New York Live Arts Names New Director

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New York Live Arts, the Chelsea dance theater directed by the choreographer Bill T. Jones, has appointed Thomas O. Kriegsmann as its director of programs, a new position that will include artist development projects, as well as programming at the theater. Although the theater is the home of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, it also presents a hefty season of performances by other artists, including an annual Live Ideas festival.

In announcing the new position, on Thursday, the organization said that Mr. Kriegsmann would be part of a leadership trio with Mr. Jones, the artistic director and Jean Davidson, the executive director and chief executive. He takes up his new duties on Nov. 17.

Mr. Kriegsmann comes to the position with experience as a producer of experimental stage works, starting in the late 1990s, and is best known for his work with ArKtype, a production company that he founded in 2006 to present music, theater, dance and interdisciplinary projects, both in the United States and internationally. Mr. Kriegsmann said on Thursday that ArKtype had several projects in the works, as well as touring commitments, that would be unaffected by his departure, and he hoped the company would continue producing experimental work.

“I’m excited about the future as we launch into this new chapter at New York Live Arts,” Mr. Jones said in a statement. “Tommy brings a strong track-record of programming critically acclaimed works from a range of artistic disciplines that are both aesthetically pleasing and intellectually engaging. I look forward to taking risks, activating lively discourse surrounding the hard-hitting aesthetic and social issues of our times and continuing to present provocative art with Tommy on board.”

Boston Symphony and Andris Nelsons to Celebrate Tanglewood Center’s 75th Anniversary

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There will be nothing understated this summer when the Boston Symphony Orchestra celebrates the 75th anniversary of its summer music academy, the Tanglewood Music Center: Andris Nelsons will conduct the center’s orchestra in a performance of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” featuring three choruses and a roster of star soloists including Christine Goerke, Klaus Florian Vogt and Matthias Goerne. Those who cannot make it to the Berkshires for the concert, scheduled for Aug. 8, can watch it on a free live webcast.

The concert promises to be one of the showpieces of the 2015 Tanglewood season, which was announced Thursday. It will be Mr. Nelsons’s first season there since officially becoming music director of the Boston Symphony, and he plans to lead five other programs there in August, featuring music of Beethoven, Shostakovich, Mendelssohn and Strauss. The soprano Kristine Opolais, who is married to Mr. Nelsons, will join him Aug. 15 to perform the Willow Song and “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s “Otello,” among other things.

The season will also feature Neville Marriner conducting Schumann and Mozart; Christoph von Dohnanyi leading an all-Beethoven concert and an all-Mozart concert; and Charles Dutoit conducting Ravel’s “Mother Goose Suite” and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” on a program with Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, featuring the soloist Leonidas Kavakos. Mr. Goerne will sing Schubert’s “Winterreise,” which he had a big success with this week in New York, and Bryn Terfel and Sondra Radvanovsky will appear in a concert performance of Act I from Puccini’s “Tosca.”

There will also be performances by the Boston Pops, and by pop stars including Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga. The festival will run from June 20 through Labor Day weekend.

Music

Boy George Ailment Forces Culture Club to Cancel Tours

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The American and British tours that Culture Club announced during the summer have been canceled, a spokeswoman for the band said Thursday, because Boy George, the band’s flamboyant lead singer, has developed a throat polyp. The polyp was discovered this week, and Boy George’s doctor has advised him not to sing and that an operation may be required.

The tour, the band’s first with its full original lineup since it broke up in 1986, was to begin in Rancho Mirage, Calif., on Nov. 15, and was to include performances at the Beacon Theater in New York (Nov. 25 and 26) and at the Trump Taj Mahal, in Atlantic City (Nov. 28), the final stop on the American tour. The British tour was to have run from Dec. 1 to 15. Tickets will be refunded at the point of purchase.

“We are hoping we can reschedule the concerts or next year,” the band said in a statement, “and hopefully George’s problem will be resolved.”

Kelsey Grammer to Join Broadway ‘Finding Neverland’

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Kelsey Grammer Valerie Macon/Getty Images

Emmy Award winner Kelsey Grammer will return to Broadway this spring in the new musical “Finding Neverland,” playing the largely comic role of Charles Frohman, the theater producer of “Peter Pan” playwright J.M. Barrie, according to a show advertisement to be published on Sunday in The New York Times.

The Broadway production will also star Laura Michelle Kelly as Barrie’s love interest and the mother of four boys who inspire him to write “Peter Pan.” Ms. Kelly played the same role in this summer’s production of “Finding Neverland” in Cambridge, Mass.; Mr. Grammer, who is also a Tony Award nominee for the 2010 “La Cage aux Folles,” is taking over the role from Michael McGrath.

The actor Matthew Morrison (“Glee”) will play Barrie in the musical, which begins performances March 15. A spokesman for the musical declined to comment but said an announcement would be made on Thursday’s “Today” show.

A Call to Reinstate Tony Awards for Sound Design

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Seeking to influence a Tony Awards committee meeting on Thursday, Broadway sound designers have submitted a petition with 32,495 signatures urging the committee to reverse its decision to eliminate the Tonys for best sound design for a play and for a musical. Among the signatories are the Tony winners Hugh Jackman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Diane Paulus and Stephen Sondheim.

The Tony Awards Administration Committee voted in June to eliminate the two awards, which had been given since 2008. No official reason was given, but committee members cited three factors at the time: Few of the 800 Tony voters, whose ballots determine the sound design winners, know what sound design is or how to judge it; a large number of them forgo voting for sound design at all because of this lack of expertise; and some administration committee members believe that sound design is more of a technical craft than a theatrical art form. In place of the sound design Tonys, the committee is expected to award special Tony Awards in future years for exceptional sound design work.

John Gromada, a Tony-nominated sound designer who is working on this fall’s Broadway revival of “The Elephant Man,” said he and his colleagues were hoping the committee would restore the two Tony categories and then work with designers on ways to prepare Tony voters to assess sound design.

“People may not think they have the skills to judge sound design, but we think they do if they’re clearly told what to look and listen for,” Mr. Gromada said. “Let’s at least give that a try first before getting rid of the awards,” he added, saying that designers were considering recording videos to post on YouTube explaining the ins and outs of sound design.

Mr. Gromada said he and other designers had lobbied several of the artists and producers on the committee about reversing its decision. Mr. Gromada said he had spoken to William Ivey Long, a Tony-winning costume designer who is chairman of the American Theater Wing, which helps run the Tonys, and Mr. Long expressed sympathy for the sound designers. It was not clear if Mr. Long, a prominent committee member, would push to reverse the decision, Mr. Gromada said. Mr. Long did not reply to a request for comment on Wednesday, and his spokesman declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for the committee declined to comment on the agenda for Thursday’s meeting or whether the petition would be discussed. Even if the sound design awards were restored, they would almost certainly not be in contention for the 2014-15 season because some Tony-eligible shows have already opened and closed and Tony voters were not expected to assess them with sound design in mind.

Minnesota Orchestra Removes ‘Interim’ From President’s Title

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The Minnesota Orchestra has appointed Kevin Smith its new president and chief executive, the chairman of the orchestra’s board, Gordon M. Sprenger, announced Wednesday. Mr. Smith was elected to the position by a unanimous vote of the board, in effect confirming him in the role in which he has been acting in an interim capacity since Sept. 1, when the previous president and chief executive, Michael Henson, stepped down.

Mr. Henson had been a lightning rod during bitter labor negotiations and a 16-month lockout, which ended in January. Mr. Smith, 63, joined the orchestra’s management in July. He was president and chief executive of the Minnesota Opera for 25 years before he retired from that company in 2011.

Osmo Vanska, the orchestra’s music director, said in a statement: “I have been very impressed by Kevin’s ability to listen and to bring people together, qualities which make him the right leader to guide the organization through a period of growth and rebuilding. I believe that he shares my artistic vision for where the Minnesota Orchestra should go, and I believe he will help to bring our artistic aspirations to reality.”

Taylor Swift’s ’1989’ Reigns at No. 1

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Taylor Swift Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Taylor Swift’s “1989” remains at the top of the Billboard 200 for a second week, not surprisingly, with sales of 402,000 copies during the week ending Nov. 9, the magazine and Nielsen SoundScan reported. That is a drop of 69 percent from Ms. Swift’s first-week sales, but it means that in the two weeks since the album was released, it has sold nearly 1.7 million copies, an extraordinary number these days. By contrast, the disc holding the No. 2 sales spot – the 52nd installment of the “Now That’s What I Call Music!” – sold 59,000 in its second week on the chart, after 103,000 last week, for combined sales that are less than a tenth of Ms. Swift’s.

The chart’s top 10 includes two debuts: Bette Midler’s “It’s the Girls,” Ms. Midler’s first album of new material since her 2006 Christmas album, “Cool Yule,” enters at No. 3 with sales of 40,000; and the Scottish singer and D.J. Calvin Harris’s “Motion” makes its first appearance at No. 5, having sold 35,000. Jason Aldean’s “Old Boots, New Dirt” holds the fourth spot (up from No. 5, last week) with 35,000 sales.

Filling out an eclectic top 10 are Florida Georgia Line’s “Anything Goes,” at No. 6; Barbra Streisand’s “Partners” at No. 7; Sam Smith’s “In the Lonely Hour” at No. 8; Brantley Gilbert’s “Just as I Am,” which benefited from discount pricing at the Google Play music store (where it was 99 cents) at No. 9; and Sam Hunt’s “Montevallo” at No. 10.

On the digital songs chart, Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” having dropped to No. 2, slides back up to the top spot with 190,000 download sales. Billboard attributes the song’s new burst of energy to her performance of the song, as a duet with Miranda Lambert, on the Country Music Awards broadcast on Nov. 5. And just below Ms. Trainor’s song are two tracks from Ms. Swift’s album – “Blank Space,” down from No. 1 last week, with 164,000 downloads, and “Shake It Off,” with 130,000 downloads.

A Season’s Worth of Music in a Weekend at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival

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Downtown, in the musical sense, seems to be expanding southward. Big Ears, a festival in Knoxville, Tenn., in which indie classical, pop and jazz composers and ensembles rub shoulders, has announced its 2015 roster, and it reads like a season listing for Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, compressed into a single weekend, March 27-29.

The Kronos Quartet will be the festival’s artists-in-residence, and will perform several programs, including “Landfall,” its collaboration with Laurie Anderson. Two rock guitarists-turned-classical composers, Nels Cline of Wilco and Bryce Dessner of the National, will also join forces with Kronos, as will the Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq.

The schedule also includes the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, which will perform Max Richter’s “Vivaldi: The Four Seasons Recomposed,” a contemporary expansion of the popular set of Baroque concertos. The Minimalist pioneer Terry Riley will also perform; as will the genre-straddling composers Harold Budd, Ben Frost and Amen Dunes; the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell; the Dutch lutenist and composer Jozef van Wissem; and the folksingers Sam Amidon and Rhiannon Giddens. The ensembles on the roster include the Bad Plus, SQÜRL (in which the film director Jim Jarmusch plays guitar), Swans and Tune-Yards.

The full roster is available at the festival’s website, BigEarsFestival.com.

WNYC’s ‘Soundcheck’ to Go Online-Only

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John Schaefer Chad Batka for The New York Times

“Soundcheck,” the weekday music program on WNYC that has been a staple of the New York music scene since 2002, will be going off the air at the end of this week.

“Soundcheck,” which mixes live performances with artist interviews and talks — sometimes in-depth, sometimes simply chatty — about the machinations of the music industry, will continue in a modified form online, the show announced on Monday night. But Friday will be its last appearance on the air.

At the end of Monday’s edition of “Soundcheck” — which featured an interview with Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, and a live performance by the singer Kimbra — John Schaefer, its longtime host, told his listeners that starting next Monday the show was going “all digital.” He also advised his listeners: “For those of you who listen online or via podcast, this won’t be a big deal. But if you listen only on the radio, it will be a bit of a switch. Instead of listening to us on the air at a specific time, you’ll find us anytime at Soundcheck.org.”

Mr. Schaefer’s other radio show, “New Sounds” — on WNYC since 1982 — will remain on the air. He will continue with the online version of “Soundcheck,” although exactly what form the show will take is unclear. A spokeswoman for the station said it will offer live and archived performances, playlists and dispatches from Mr. Schaefer “on the state of music and New York’s greatest musical characters.”

The change comes as WNYC has made an increased push for podcasts, with online shows like “Death, Sex and Money” and “The Sporkful,” and frequent on-air promotion of the podcast versions of popular radio broadcast shows like “Radiolab.”

In response to questions about the change, Mr. Schaefer wrote in an email on Tuesday: “Our videos and podcasts do numbers that we can’t match on the air at 9 p.m., so they’ve asked us to double down on the digital stuff.”

“We will still be doing all the things we’ve been doing, but on a more reasonable schedule, instead of killing ourselves producing three different segments every night,” he added. “We’re still figuring out how to rule the web as of Monday, so you have not heard the last of us yet.”

Tig Notaro Says She’s Healing After Surgery

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Tig Notaro Victoria Will/Invision, via Associated Press

The comedian Tig Notaro said on Tuesday that she was recovering from a burst cyst that had required her to undergo emergency surgery and cancel several planned performances.

Only a couple of days after an enthusiastically received appearance at Town Hall in Manhattan, where Ms. Notaro removed her shirt to show her mastectomy scars, the comedian said she would have to cancel weekend shows in Boston and Denver because of an unspecified medical emergency.

Ms. Notaro wrote in a message on Facebook addressed to “dearest humans” that she was “finally on the mend” after having collapsed in pain following a performance in Philadelphia. She wrote that a visit to the emergency room revealed that “a cyst had burst causing MASSIVE internal bleeding.” Ms. Notaro continued, “They thought the hemorrhaging would stop and heal on its own, but unfortunately it did not. So, after a couple of horribly uncomfortable days of pain, they had to do surgery to stop it and clean up my insides.”

Offering her thanks to her fans (and accompanying her note with video showing her convalescing in a hospital bed), Ms. Notaro wrote that she was “resting on a ton of drugs, walking when I can, doing my breathing exercises and trying my darnedest to get back to this tour that has been nothing short of the best time.”