It has been 30 years since Harry Connick, Jr. became an improbable pop star, on the basis of a movie soundtrack that just happened to put many of his best features on display. If you know Connick at all, you might remember that album, When Harry Met Sally..., as some kind of watershed: a burnished vision of New York sophistication that renewed the American songbook for a dashing new cohort.

What is the most urgent undertaking for an artist in 2019? Perhaps it is to find music in the noise oppressing the atmosphere, the (mis)information, static and chaotic emotion permeating people's heads. For example: Billie Eilish, the Los Angeles teenager who, with her 22-year-old brother Finneas, made the most streamed and talked-about album of 2019, was once getting her braces adjusted, listening to the whir of the drill shaving down their edges.

Tina: The Tina Turner Musical tells the rags-to-riches — to rags again, then to riches again — saga of Tina Turner's life.

It starts in Nutbush, Tenn., where the young Anna Mae Bullock was born. Then it documents her rise to stardom with Ike Turner — who she eventually married and then left after years of abuse — and then her improbable (but somehow entirely fitting) second rise to fame as a solo performer, in her mid-40s no less.

Ever since Beethoven's iconic Ninth Symphony premiered May 7, 1824 at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna, it has remained arguably the most popular composition in the classical music canon, thanks largely to its final movement, the "Ode to Joy," with a text by poet Friedrich Schiller.

But Beethoven's music has become something much more than popular. With its expansive length, mold-busting design, and the inclusion of solo singers and chorus, he was proposing nothing less than a philosophy for humanity.

One of classical music's most beloved conductors has died: Latvian-born Mariss Jansons, who was age 76 at his death on Saturday in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Jansons had long had a heart condition, which first became known when he collapsed on the podium while conducting in Norway more than 20 years ago.