One to the New York Times Popcast, your condos in that individual's head of music news

and criticism. I'm your host, John Caramonica.

Does everybody feel invigorated? A cold slap. A cold slap. Gustav Moller. That is Moller's

Fifth and if you have been paying attention in recent weeks to the discourse, more than the

discourse, Moller's Fifth plays a central role in the film Tar. Tar came out a few weeks ago.

It is a film festival favorite. It is a bout. Lydia Tar, a fictional conductor and composer

played by Kate Blanchett. It is a movie that touches on a lot of hot button issues of the day. We're

talking, separating the art from the artist, cancel culture, progressiveism versus originalism,

so on, so forth. It's nice when a movie about music comes out that is thought provoking and

inspires curiosity and eeks out into the larger discourse. Yes, this is about the world's

classical music, which is a little bit far from what we usually talk about, but TBQH is not that

different from a lot of the things that we speak about weekend and week out here. If you have

been seen tar, obviously it's going to be able to spoilers if that kind of thing matters to you,

but the point is the subjects and the ideas we're going to be talking about today

are going to feel really familiar. In order to talk about the movie, I wanted to have folks coming

at it from two different perspectives. So we're going to have Zach Wolfe, who is the times

is classical music critic and also Alison Wilmore, who is the film critic for Vulture,

and we're going to get into what the movie gets correct about this world and what it might be

struggling to get correct. We're going to talk about the issues that it raises and some of the

scenes that are among the more challenging to watch. We're also just going to talk about great

filmmaking. Damn it. Great filmmaking. I'm mostly like this movie. I will say like the first 90

minutes are better than the following 60 minutes, but as a character study, I was really fascinating,

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