In the past few years, country music has reëxerted its sway on the pop-music charts and the broader Zeitgeist they reflect, but the genre’s greatest crossover success story remains the Texas singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves. Since her 2013 major-label début, “Same Trailer Different Park,” she has been a shaping voice of modern Americana, not just in the way her music marries rustic and cosmopolitan sensibilities but in its underlying progressive ideal. Clever, observant, and funny as hell, she is one of music’s sharpest lyricists, and a breakthrough in 2018, the kaleidoscopic disco-country masterpiece “Golden Hour,” expanded her creative world view, scaling up from small-town concerns to something more universal, winning Album of the Year at the Grammys in the process.The country artist Kacey Musgraves swings through Madison Square Garden.
Photograph by Ramona Rosales / AUGUSTMusgraves’s subsequent albums have been sprawling in their search for meaning, and even more adventurous in the sonic pathways travelled to get there. “Star-Crossed,” from 2021, was a psychedelic divorce record that incorporated soft rock and dance music, while “Deeper Well,” from 2024, goes even more soft-spun for the songs of her Saturn return and its reassessed priorities, which included seeing the big picture. Her most recent album, “Middle of Nowhere,” is a homecoming, if not a full reset. Not only does its music scale back to the sounds of the country canon—bluegrass and Western swing, regional Mexican music such as norteño, and the Creole blues of zydeco, with plenty of acoustic guitar and pedal steel—it does so for meditations on how she defines herself as a woman and as an artist. Musgraves brings those conversations with her to the stage at Madison Square Garden, on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, as she continues her journey of self-discovery.—Sheldon PearceDanceIn 2001, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company prepared a work that was scheduled to première, on a stage between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, on Sept. 12. The début did not happen, but, twenty-five years later, the company performs a new piece that reflects on that moment and all that has happened since. “Curriculum IV: Spin and Spin! Turn! Turn! Turn!,” the final offering of this year’s River to River Festival, features a live score by Samora Pinderhughes sourced from Nina Simone’s rendition of “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season).” The free performances at Wagner Park also nod to the outdoor theatre’s presiding spirit, the Statue of Liberty.—Brian Seibert (Robert F. Wagner, Jr., Park; Sept. 10, 12-13.)ClassicalThis has been a big summer for moviegoing—“The Odyssey,” “Minions 3,” “Jackass 5,” “Scary Movie 6”—and the Met Opera wants in on the action. It’s reigniting its annual HD Festival, screening live recordings of recent operas. Did you miss the Met’s début of Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego”? They’ve got you. What about “I Puritani,” the first new production of Bellini’s bel-canto masterwork that the Met has put on in almost fifty years? Breathe easy. Have you always been afraid to sneak to the rest room during Wagner’s nearly five-hour “Tristan und Isolde”? No sweat: the festival splits it up into two movies, a day apart. You’ll just have to wait twenty-four more hours for that chord to resolve.—Jane Bua (Josie Robertson Plaza; Sept. 2-7.)Off BroadwayIrene Sofia Lucio, John David Washington, and Jason Ralph in “Disruption.”
