Patricia Barretto named interim president and CEO of Harris Theater

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Nick Cave has been singing about mortality for decades, and he's really good at it. Whether the narratives are biblical or pulpy, the victims innocents or death row convicts, the circumstances comprehensible or cruelly random, Cave's songs are on intimate terms with the infinite ways a life can be extinguished. And yet, "Skeleton Tree", his latest album with his estimable band, the Bad Seeds, is a relatively concise song cycle shadowed by death that feels different than all the rest. Read the full review.

Jordan Strauss / AP

"Blonde" is a critique of materialism with Frank Ocean employing two distinct voices, like characters in a play, a recurring theme throughout the album and perhaps its finest sonic achievement. A party spirals out of control, the music rich but low key, a melange of organ and hovering synthesizers. Ocean uses distorting devices on his voice to add emotional texture and to enhance and sharpen the characters he briefly embodies. The upshot: They're all little slices of Ocean's personality with a role to play and they each sound distinct. Read the full review.

Not many albums could survive Ed Sheeran performing reggae, but Pharrell Williams always took chances — not all of them successful — in N.E.R.D.Despite the Sheeran gaffe, "No One Ever Really Dies," the band's first album in seven years, is a typically diverse, trippy ride from the group that established Williams' career as a performer in the early 2000s alongside Chad Hugo and Shay Haley. Read the full review.

Nuccio DiNuzzo / baiduhai

"Black America Again" (ARTium/Def Jam) arrives as a one of the year's most potent protest albums. The album sags midway through with a handful of lightweight love songs, but finishes with some of its most emotionally resounding tracks: the "Glory"-like plea for redemption "Rain" with Legend, the celebration of family that is "Little Chicago Boy," and the staggering "Letter to the Free." Read the review.

"Love & Hate" shows Kiwanuka breaking out of that stylistic box. His core remains intact: a grainy, world-weary voice contemplating troubled times in intimate musical settings. The album announces its more ambitious intentions from the outset, with the trembling strings, episodic piano chords and wordless vocals of the 10-minute "Cold Little Heart." It's a striking, if atypical, approach to reintroducing himself to his audience — a five-minute preamble before Kiwanuka begins to sing. Read the full review.

"Peace Trail" — Neil Young's second album this year and sixth since 2014 — is occasionally fascinating. It's also not very good, a release that surely would've benefited from a bit more time and consideration, which might have given Young's ad hoc band — drummer Jim Keltner and bassist Paul Bushnell — a chance to actually learn the songs. But the four-day recording session sounds like a getting-to-know-you warmup instead of a finished product. Read the full review.

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On "Here" (Merge), the band's first album in six years and 10th overall, the front line of Norman Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley once again trades songs (four each) and lead vocals, over sturdily constructed pop-rock arrangements. But the band has taken some subtle evolutionary turns to where it's now a faint shadow of its "Bandwagonesque" incarnation. Read the review.

NBC

Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo" (GOOD/Def Jam) sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished album. It's a mess, more a series of marketing opportunities in which West changed the album title and the track listing multiple times, to the point where the very thing that made West tolerable despite a penchant for tripping over his own ego — the music itself — became anti-climactic. Read the review.

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By Morgan Greene

PUBLISHED: June 7, 2017 at 6:10 PM CDT | UPDATED: July 2, 2019 at 9:28 PM CDT

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Patricia Barretto has been appointed interim president and CEO of the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, effective immediately.

Paul Organisak, who took over the position in February after Michael Tiknis’ departure, has requested an indefinite leave of absence, according to the announcement. A spokesman said Organisak’s leave is due to personal reasons.

Barretto joined the Harris Theater executive team as vice president of marketing and communications in 2015, and in 2016 oversaw the marketing, development and community engagement departments as executive vice president of external affairs. Barretto previously was the executive director of Toronto’s Opera Atelier.

The Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph St., is an indoor 1,525-seat venue in Millennium Park.

MORE FROM THE THEATER LOOP:

Harris Theater appoints a new CEO

Elizabeth Telford sings ‘Will He Like Me’ – and gets a marriage proposal

Can ‘The King and I’ change with the times?

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