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    The Ultimate Brenda Lee Primer

    Listen to 11 songs that show she’s more than her classic, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”Brenda Lee is most known for “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” but she was also a prolific chart-topper in the 1960s.Gabriel McCurdy for The New York TimesDear listeners,Sitting at No. 8 on this week’s Billboard Hot 100 — right between a sleek hit from the 20-year-old pop star Tate McRae and the latest offering from Taylor Swift’s vault — is a 65-year-old song, sung by an artist who is about to turn 79. Which, if you do the math (I’ll wait), means that artist recorded it when she was just 13.That song is the holiday anthem “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and the artist is Brenda Lee, an icon of American music I was lucky enough to interview in her Nashville home a few weeks ago, for a profile published earlier this week. Christmas classics often have a longer tail than most pop songs, but the emphasis that Billboard places on streaming numbers now means that some of those classics climb (and even top) the charts each December. The fact that this year marks the 65th anniversary of “Rockin’” is also giving it an added boost.But the reason I wanted to profile Lee is to remind people that she is much, much more than her Christmas standard. In the 1950s, the petite firecracker was an early pioneer of rock ’n’ roll, her raspy voice providing a fitting soundtrack for teenage rebellion. But she could also win over those teenagers’ parents with sophisticated ballads that recalled crooners three times her age. Though the Georgia-born Lee was marketed as a pop act, she was a Southern girl at heart, and in the 1970s she settled in Nashville and was a consistent presence on the country charts.Lee is a local legend in Music City, but in the wider world she’s not quite a household name — at least not compared to her peers. She is among the four artists who charted the most singles in the 1960s, a whopping 47. Who are the others? Oh, just Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Ray Charles.For today’s playlist, I want to show why Lee deserves the same respect as those marquee names. To show her impressive range, I’ve selected some of her early rockabilly numbers (“Sweet Nothin’s,” “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”), her most heartstring-tugging ballads (“I’m Sorry,” “Emotions”) and a few of her later country hits (“Nobody Wins,” “Big Four Poster Bed”). By the time you’re done listening, you’ll understand why they call her Little Miss Dynamite.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. “Sweet Nothin’s”One of Lee’s most enduringly cool classics, this song — recorded when she was just 14 — is a showcase not only for her soulful vocals, but for the sharp production style of her longtime collaborator Owen Bradley. It’s a testament to his innovative ear that the song would be sampled long after its release, first in the backing vocals of Prince’s sparse 1986 smash “Kiss,” and later in the “uh-huh, honey” that recurs throughout Kanye West’s 2013 single “Bound 2.” (Listen on YouTube)2. “Emotions”The sumptuous atmosphere, smoky crooning and vaguely eerie strings — how has this 1961 torch song not yet been used in a David Lynch movie? (Listen on YouTube)3. “Dynamite”This is the song that gave Brenda Lee the nickname “Little Miss Dynamite,” a moniker that stuck so long that she used it as the title of her 2002 autobiography. If you were to listen to it out of context, you’d probably think the person singing it, with her bluesy growl and intuitive phrasing, was a woman of at least 25. So viewers of the country music showcase “Ozark Jubilee” must have been shocked to see it performed on TV by an unbelievably precocious 12-year-old dressed like Shirley Temple. (Listen on YouTube)4. “Nobody Wins”Let’s jump ahead to the later part of Lee’s career with this 1972 tune penned by a then up-and-coming talent who represented country music’s future: Kris Kristofferson. “Nobody Wins” was one of the songs that heralded Lee’s return to her country roots, while also displaying a new richness and maturity in her voice. (Listen on YouTube)5. “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”First recorded by the Black, Nashville-based group Alvin Gaines & the Themes, this 1959 ditty finds Lee leaning into the rockabilly sound that suited her voice so well. (Listen on YouTube)6. “I Want to Be Wanted (Per Tutta La Vida)”One of my absolute favorite Brenda Lee vocal performances, this wrenching ballad — originally written in Italian by the songwriters Pino Spotti and Alberto Testa as an entry in a local song contest — topped the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1960, becoming Lee’s second No. 1 hit. She was still just 15 when she recorded “I Want to Be Wanted,” effectively blending the song’s emotional maturity with some good ol’ teenage melodrama. (Listen on YouTube)7. “Big Four Poster Bed”Another later country hit for Lee, released in 1974, this rollicking tune poignantly charts a family’s history through a handmade bed that is passed down from generation to generation. For Lee, it’s a relatively rare foray into narrative storytelling, but it was written by someone who certainly knew how to spin a yarn: Shel Silverstein. (Listen on YouTube)8. “Break It to Me Gently”One of Lee’s greatest heartbreak ballads, “Break It to Me Gently” from 1963 — featured in an early episode of “Mad Men” — represents the more sophisticated, supper-club side of her artistry. (Listen on YouTube)9. “That’s All You Gotta Do”This upbeat Jerry Reed-penned 1960 single shows that Lee can pull off R&B, too. (Listen on YouTube)10. “Dum Dum”A sassy, slinky, gum-smacking Top 10 hit from her 1961 album “All the Way,” this song demonstrates some of the sonic changes that were taking place in rock ’n’ roll as the 1950s became the 1960s — and how well suited Lee was to adapting to them. (Listen on YouTube)11. “I’m Sorry”Lee’s first No. 1 hit was this dreamy, contrite 1960 ballad, which she imbued with an emotional wisdom well beyond her years. It also has an unexpected connection to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” When Lee’s holiday single was first released in 1958, she wasn’t yet very well known, so it failed to chart. After the success of “I’m Sorry,” though, her savvy label rereleased “Rockin’” to capitalize on Lee’s newfound popularity. The rest is history. (Listen on YouTube)Uh-huh, honey,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Ultimate Brenda Lee Primer” track listTrack 1: “Sweet Nothin’s”Track 2: “Emotions”Track 3: “Dynamite”Track 4: “Nobody Wins”Track 5: “Let’s Jump the Broomstick”Track 6: “I Want to Be Wanted (Per Tutta La Vida)”Track 7: “Big Four Poster Bed”Track 8: “Break It to Me Gently”Track 9: “That’s All You Gotta Do”Track 10: “Dum Dum”Track 11: “I’m Sorry”Bonus TracksSpeaking of profiles of legends, here’s Jon Pareles on Peter Gabriel, whose new album “I/O” is out today.And in this week’s Playlist, we have new music from Beyoncé, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Oxlade and more. Listen here. More

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    Shane MacGowan: Raising a Farewell Pint in Dublin Pubs

    The Pogues singer, who died Thursday, took traditional Irish music in a new direction. Most people in Ireland loved him for it.Christmas came early this year in Dublin, but too late for a beloved adopted son.On the last evening in November, a wet Thursday, cars at the rush hour stop lights blared “Fairytale of New York” on a thousand radios. From the sidewalk, you could hear drivers and passengers singing along: “The boys from the N.Y.P.D. choir still singing ‘Galway Bay,’ and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.”The song’s renowned lyricist and co-writer, Shane MacGowan, the British-born frontman of the punk-folk band the Pogues, died earlier that day. Ireland — his greatest muse, and ancestral home — was coming to terms with a death that had, thanks to MacGowan’s well-known addictions to alcohol and drugs, long been foretold.MacGowan would have turned 66 if he had lived to his next birthday — on Christmas Day, the subject of “Fairytale of New York,” the Pogues’ greatest hit, in which an elderly Irish couple berate and console each other for lives gone to seed in a soured Big Apple.Photographs of MacGowan and the Pogues were shown on screens at the Wall of Fame in the Temple Bar area of Dublin on Friday.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesOn South William Street, in Dublin’s city center, a gaggle of young women, dressed for a night out, were singing “Fairytale” as they rushed through freezing rain to a nearby pub. Student nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital, from which MacGowan was discharged last week after a long final illness, said they had heard news of his death at work that morning.“We all just started singing ‘Fairytale of New York’, and we got very emotional,” said Eve McCormack, 22.“He was fantastic,” said her friend Sophie McEvoy, 21. “We hoped he might make it, because Christmas is his birthday. But not this time, I suppose.”Leah Barry, 37, a social worker, was having a pre-dinner drink nearby at Grogan’s pub on Castle Street, one of the last holdouts of an older, more Bohemian Dublin. She grew emotional as she talked about her favorite Pogues songs — “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” about a broken veteran of a nameless war, and “Rainy Night in Soho,” a bruised and tender love song.“I was with a group of Irish students going off to America,” Barry recalled, “and we bought a compilation album of Irish songs at Dublin Airport on the way out. That’s how I fell in love with the Pogues. Whenever I hear those songs I think of five of us in the one bedroom in Montauk, having a mad summer.”Leah Barry said the Pogues’ music reminded her of traveling from Ireland to America, listening to their music on a summer abroad.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesAcross the river Liffey in the Cobblestone pub, a famous venue for Irish traditional musicians, an old-school session was in full swing in the front bar: guitars, tin whistle, fiddles, uilleann bagpipes and bodhrán, a traditional goatskin drum. In the early 1980s, the Pogues gate-crashed this genre with a London-Irish swagger, subverting its pieties with punk vigor and venom. To its old tropes and titles — “The Boys from the County Cork,” “The Boys from the County Mayo,” “The Boys from the County Armagh” — MacGowan added his own variations, like “The Boys from the County Hell,” with lyrics that showcased his scabrous humor and diaspora-wide vision.Born in the county of Kent, near London, to Irish parents, MacGowan first came to music through the city’s punk scene, then found his lifelong inspiration in the dark poetry of his ancestral homeland, and in particular the Irish diaspora in the United States (“Body of an American,” “Fairytale of New York”), Britain (“Rainy Night in Soho,” and many more), Australia (a cover of “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”) and even Mexico (“A Pistol for Paddy Garcia”).Far from being offended by MacGowan’s irreverence, most people in Ireland loved him for it.A book of condolences for MacGowan at Mansion House, the mayor’s residence, in Dublin on Friday.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesOn guitar at the Cobblestone traditional session on Thursday night was Colm O’Brien, a Dublin-born musician now living in Boston. “My own personal opinion is that we are only going to realize his genius in the next decades,” O’Brien said. “He introduced people to Irish music who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise, even Irish people. People who were young and who were punk, and wouldn’t have listened.”Tomás Mulligan, the 33-year-old son of the Cobblestone’s owner, Tom Mulligan, said that MacGowan had directly inspired his own musical project, a punk-folk collective called Ispíní na hÉireann (“Sausages of Ireland”).“Every Irish trad musician went through a phase when they were young, when their parents forced them to play the old music and then they rebelled,” Mulligan said. “But then they came back to it. It was the Pogues who brought me back to it.”In the Cobblestone pub, a famous venue for Irish traditional musicians, an old-school session in full swing, featuring guitars, tin whistle, fiddles, uilleann bagpipes and bodhrán, a traditional goatskin drum.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesAs Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in “The Leopard,” “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.” John Francis Flynn, a rising star of the Irish folk scene, expressed a similar thought over a drink in the back of the Cobblestone.“Most good traditional artists have two things in common,” Flynn said: “a real respect for the source material, but also having an urge to do something new with it.” MacGowan had “opened a door into Irish music for people who might have thought it would be twee,” he added.“What trad songs do is, they are almost like a time machine,” Flynn said. “You can connect with people who are long gone, and with history.”MacGowan’s work “was romantic, but it was real and it was honest. It wasn’t simple,” he added. “And it was sometimes brutal.” More

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    Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Movie Bonus, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Hurray for the Riff Raff, Tyla, Lana Del Rey and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Beyoncé, ‘My House’Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour film opens in theaters on Friday, and a brand-new song plays over the closing credits: the bold, brassy and bass-heavy “My House.” Fusing ’90s house music with more hard-edge, futuristic sounds, the track draws from several of the different eras of dance music Beyoncé honored on her kaleidoscopic 2022 album “Renaissance,” with a little of the marching band flair of “Homecoming” thrown in for good measure. “Don’t make me get up out of my seat,” Bey growls with an extra curl in her lip. “Don’t make me come up off of this beat.” You heard her! LINDSAY ZOLADZTyla, ‘Truth or Dare’Tyla, from South Africa, is courting global audiences by bringing the breathy tunefulness of R&B singers like Aaliyah to songs that fuse sleek electronic 1990s R&B with current African beats. She’s nominated for a Grammy for her international hit, “Water.” In her new song, “Truth or Dare,” she glides above an amapiano groove to address an on-again, off-again affair that’s complicated by past disappearances and her newfound success: “Would you still want me if I didn’t have it all?” Singing “care” and “dare” as two-syllable words are just one of the hooks. JON PARELESOxlade, ‘Katigori’The Nigerian hitmaker Oxlade presents his success as a higher mission in his new single “Katigori,” gently crooning, “So many mysteries I gots to unfold/The music legacy I gots to uphold.” He goes on to dismiss imitators and backbiters, but Afrobeats syncopations, three rising chords and a panoply of vocal harmonies keep him sounding more sincere than smug. PARELESHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Alibi’Alynda Segarra, who makes music as Hurray for the Riff Raff, recorded the forthcoming album “The Past Is Still Alive” shortly after the death of their father. “Alibi,” the opening track and first single, takes a unique, ultimately poignant approach to grief: “You don’t have to die if you don’t want to die,” Segarra sings in a tough-talking voice that always threatens to break, caught halfway between denial and bargaining. The tempo is stomping and insistent, like the too-quick march of time. ZOLADZLana Del Rey, ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’On “The Grants,” the opening song off Lana Del Rey’s last album, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” the (other) elusive chanteuse pays tribute to “‘Rocky Mountain High,’ the way John Denver sang.” She’s now released another tribute to Denver: a cover of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Leave it to Del Rey to take a ubiquitous piece of Americana and make it seem hauntingly new. She slightly slows Denver’s jaunty pace, swapping out acoustic guitar for melancholy piano. But just when you think she’s made this anthem too much of a downer for a singalong to break out, a warm chorus of other voices joins in and leads her home. ZOLADZEnglish Teacher, ‘Mastermind Specialism’English Teacher, a indie-rock band from Leeds, often spins terse little contrapuntal patterns that can grow into a post-punk blare. But on its new single, “Mastermind Specialism,” it stays fairly restrained and folky. The song is a waltz, with its patterns picked at first on acoustic guitars, while Lily Fontaine sings about the difficulty of making choices: “Bittersweet and less is more/Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” The song swells but stays appropriately inconclusive. PARELESOscar Peterson, ‘My One and Only Love’Oscar Peterson and his classic, airtight trio — with Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums — were more than five years into their life as a group when they performed in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1964. A recording of that concert recently resurfaced, and was released last week for the first time as an LP, “Con Alma.” Peterson plays the standard ballad “My One and Only Love” with his usual flair, splicing in moments of fond hesitation with lightning-speed dashes down the keyboard, wedging in an extended Gershwin reference (at 3:40) and ending with a quote from Bach. You get the idea: If it could be done on the keyboard, he could do it. And it was never anything but a marvel to hear him go. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOLea Bertucci featuring Quartetto Maurice, ‘Vapours (Radio Edit)’The saxophonist, clarinetist and experimental sound artist Lea Bertucci uses musical systems both avant-garde and ancient to make music that leaves notions of harmony, rhythm and melody outside the door. Instead she’s focused on the resonance and slow disappearance of sound, in a moment when so much of our digital existence feels both immaterial and overwhelming. On “Vapours,” from her new album “Of Shadow and Substance,” she works with Quartetto Maurice, an Italian string quartet, using a semi-composed, semi-improvised compositional method to create a sense of pressure and release. The song’s title is a reference to the “pseudo-scientific term” that was once used “to diagnose types of hysteria in women,” as Bertucci writes in the album notes. In the spirit of modernists like Morton Feldman or minimalists like Éliane Radigue, she has developed a powerfully patient musical language, paying homage and also bidding good riddance to a world in decay. Call it music to let go by. RUSSONELLOAndré 3000, ‘That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into a Panther and Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild’A wordless album from a great rapper? That’s what André 3000, from Outkast, decided to release with “New Blue Sun,” an 87-minute instrumental-verging-on-ambient album featuring acoustic and electronic breath-powered instruments. The 10-minute “That Night in Hawaii …” hints at Native American music with a muffled six-beat drum pulse, assorted percussion and slowly unfolding flute improvisations, at once deliberate and open-ended. PARELESO., ‘ATM’O. is a raucous jazz-rock-psychedelic-noise duo that goes by first names only: Joe on saxophone and Tash on drums, bolstered by electronics and effects. In “ATM,” Joe’s baritone saxophone moves among squalls, barks, trills and shrieks when it’s not touching down in a low, brawny riff. Tash maintains a brisk, galloping beat — sometimes tapping, sometimes bashing — until the last full minute of the track, a slow meltdown that’s engulfed in electronic entropy. PARELES More

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    At the Met Opera, ‘Tannhäuser’ Is Halted by Climate Protests

    A revival of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” was notable for the arrival of Christian Gerhaher. But with an abrupt protest, the performance took a turn.“Wolfram, wake up!” came a shout from the highest box seats of the Metropolitan Opera. “The spring is polluted!”At first, it seemed like an odd thing to throw at the character of Wolfram in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” which returned to the Met on Thursday night, with that role sung by the great baritone Christian Gerhaher in his company debut. (Indeed, his arrival was what made the night notable to begin with.) But that cry was the start of an unbroken stream of climate grievances, designed to coincide with Wolfram’s description, during the singing contest midway through Act II, of love as a miraculous spring.“The spring is tainted!” the protester up in the Family Circle continued, then dropped a banner that said, “No Opera on a Dead Planet.”Several more protesting voices emerged, from the group Extinction Rebellion. Onstage, performers froze in place until the Met’s golden curtain came down around its gilded proscenium. Demonstrators and booing audience members began to roar at each other across the vast auditorium.“Shame!” a person near me yelled in the general direction of the protests. Others howled “Go away!” and “Go home!” As a performatively bothered couple walked out, one of them, a man dressed in black tie, said, “Is there no security here?”People had questions. One person asked an usher, “Are the police here?,” while another usher asked no one in particular, “Where’s Gelb?” — referring to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager.Another banner unfurled from a box seat across the hall, saying “Extinction Rebellion,” accompanied by the group’s logo of a circle with an hourglass inside it. Someone in the box below immediately tried to pull the banner down, obscuring the text, and the woman who had dropped it was suddenly removed from her perch. Security had arrived.Gelb stepped onstage and told the audience: “We’re very sorry for the disturbance. We’re going to be starting in about one minute.”When the performance did restart, though, it didn’t last one minute before another protester rose to shout from the rear of the Orchestra section, holding a square banner of the Extinction Rebellion logo. The curtain came down again.A man near the protester ripped the banner from her hands. Another threw a playbill at her face. Two rows in front of me, someone, seemingly unfazed, started to read on a Kindle.After 20-some minutes of delays, Gelb returned to the stage and told the audience that the performance would continue, but with the house lights on, “so our security personnel in the building can remove any protesters who wish to protest and be arrested.” (The New York City Police Department later said that no arrests had been reported.) Then, he added with a strangely martial tone, “We are not going to be defeated by them.”By that point, the theater was visibly emptier — not just because of the protesters who had been taken out, but also because of the many audience members who simply gave up. Still, the show went on.Here is where I have to offer a necessary disclosure. As a critic, I’m comfortable thinking and writing about the performance up to this point. But, while I have a general sense of what followed — and what followed was excellent — I never felt fully engaged with the show again. There was the visual distraction of vigilant security, and of the police officers in the aisles. And there was the nervous anticipation of the protest’s return: Would it come back in the famed Pilgrims’ Chorus? In the “Song to the Evening Star”?It was understandable that some in the audience had been dismayed by the disruption of their night out, but it was difficult to shake the angrily bothered, even violent response from others toward the protesters. Did they consider that “Tannhäuser” comes from the most politically active time in Wagner’s life, his years in Dresden, Germany, which ended with his fleeing after the May Uprising in 1849? Did they clock that when the performance resumed, it was with the scene of a whole hall turning against Tannhäuser for an ode that to him rings of truth, and to them of heresy?The rest of the evening — which because of the protests stretched until midnight — unfolded without any disturbance beyond the usual chime of a cellphone ring. There was no more news, at least beyond the original headline of Gerhaher’s debut.And his performance is reason alone to return to this “Tannhäuser,” in Otto Schenk’s dusty and unfashionable, but utterly lovable, production from the 1970s. Gerhaher is one of our finest living lieder singers, a raconteur and a chameleon, a perceptive and persuasive interpreter whose approach to text shines in the recital hall. But he has also appeared on Europe’s opera stages; his “Wozzeck” at the Aix Festival in France this summer, performed without ever leaving the stage, was a Kafkaesque descent into torment and tragedy.The Met’s immensity can be unkind to singers with Gerhaher’s size and attention to detail. But on Thursday, he filled the hall with ease, drowned out only by the protests. He was slightly strained at his loudest, but more human for it. His “Song to the Evening Star” was not comforting or buttery, like Peter Mattei’s when this production was last revived, in 2015; a brittle solace, it ached, and felt like a true farewell.Gerhaher was surrounded by seasoned Wagnerian singers: Ekaterina Gubanova as a lush Venus; Georg Zeppenfeld as a stentorian Landgraf Hermann; Elza van den Heever as an Elisabeth more affecting in her prayerful “Allmächt’ge Jungfrau” than in the exuberant “Dich, teure Halle.” Andreas Schager’s tenor has bright power but the irrepressibility of a fire hose, which suits roles of heroic bumbling naïveté like Siegfried and Parsifal, and not so much the anguished and multidimensional Tannhäuser. His Rome Narrative in Act III was bluntly angry where it should have been shattering.In the orchestra pit, Donald Runnicles led the opera at first slowly, but with shape, the opening more spiritual than stately. That built toward orgiastic music for the Venusberg that may have been as PG-rated as the staging that followed, but it also had remarkable clarity — in phrasing and in balance. Throughout the night, Runnicles was in full control of the score, even if he could stand to relinquish a bit of his grip.With such an approach, though, the orchestra resisted the invitation for a saccharine opening to the third act, which instead took on a heart-rending holiness as it prefigured Elisabeth’s resigned prayer for death. While Runnicles gestured at the podium, security and police stalked the aisles, as if to preserve the music’s beauty by force. Not for the first or last time that evening, it made a good moment feel bad.TannhäuserThrough Dec. 23 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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    Kiss Loves to Say Goodbye. Is Its Rock ’n’ Roll Really Over?

    Farewell tours are one of pop music’s signature moves. But there’s reason to believe Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley are throwing in the towel for real this time.When Kiss plays Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, it will bring down the curtain on the band’s End of the Road farewell tour, which began in January 2019. “We’re gonna go out on top,” the bassist Gene Simmons said last year during an interview with the Los Angeles radio station KLOS-FM. There will be no more Kiss tours, he’s vowed, not ever.Yeah, maybe.In show business, sometimes the curtain drops but then comes back up, and there’s an encore. And sometimes the encore lasts a long time. Kiss fans know only too well that in 2000, the group announced a yearlong Farewell Tour. “We’re the champs again, let’s retire on top,” the guitarist Paul Stanley said in an interview printed in the tour program. (At least they’re consistent.)Music fans have a growing number of reasons to be wary and even weary of the industry’s income-generating trickery, starting with egregious ticketing fees and extortive parking charges. This year was the 50th anniversary of David Bowie’s first retirement — “It’s the last show that we’ll ever do,” he proclaimed to a delirious crowd at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, but he was back on tour less than a year later — and there have been plenty of subsequent examples of bands taking their bows, then pivoting and coming back for more.Retirement announcements should be treated with skepticism, and some artists have had cheeky fun in acknowledging the widespread practice of going away but not staying away. In 2004, Phil Collins started his First Final Farewell tour, and in 2017, he called his true farewell tour the Not Dead Yet tour. (In 2021, he joined Genesis for its The Last Domino? tour.) In a nod to Raymond Chandler, Eagles are on the road with their Long Goodbye tour, which the band says will include “as many shows in each market as their audience demands.” It could easily become the “Cats” of farewells.Depending on the artist’s age, a professed leave-taking tour might merit more or less skepticism. Bowie was 26 at the time of his first retirement, not an age when entertainers are usually willing to throw in the towel. Simmons is 74, and stomping around in seven-inch platform heels while spitting blood and blowing fire in a costume that weighs almost 40 pounds must get more difficult every year.At some point, aging can start to undermine a band’s image. Simmons was 25 when he first sang, “I wanna rock ’n’ roll all night, and party every day.” Nearly 50 years later, that level of youthful bluster just isn’t as credible. (Simmons and Stanley are the band’s two remaining original members; Peter Criss and Ace Frehley were not part of the tour.)“I do believe this is the end of the road, finally, for Kiss,” Doug Brod, author of the 2020 book “They Just Seem a Little Weird: How Kiss, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz Remade Rock and Roll,” said in a phone interview. And if it’s a ruse and a stooped-over Kiss comes back in 2028 for a We Were Just Kidding tour, Brod is OK with that. “If you’re a genuine fan, don’t you want to see the band you love as many times as you can? I don’t know why anyone would feel cheated.”More than any previous generation, baby boomer musicians built sustainable careers, and in many instances, benefited from healthier touring circumstances. As a result, a lot of them are still on the road, including Paul McCartney (81), Mick Jagger (80) and Pete Townshend (78). The roll call of recent or current farewell tours includes Joan Baez, Paul Simon, the B-52’s, Foreigner, the Oak Ridge Boys, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dead & Company, Kenny Loggins, Ted Nugent, Gladys Knight, Aerosmith and Parliament-Funkadelic. Younger acts including the rappers Styles P, Scarface, Daddy Yankee and 50 Cent are also waving buh-bye.Bowie didn’t invent the faux farewell. It’s a tradition that probably dates back to vaudeville, if not Elizabethan theater, and Bowie knew of a pretty recent bait and switch: Frank Sinatra retired in 1971, telling reporters he planned to “read Plato and grow petunias.” And, he said, “I don’t want to put on any more makeup,” a sentiment Gene Simmons might share this week.But Sinatra returned two years later, to much ballyhoo and chart success, with the album “Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back.” Bowie was paying attention. “David was a big Sinatra fan,” his former manager, Tony DeFries, recently told Mojo magazine. Bowie’s retirement was a ruse, DeFries added, to generate publicity and whip up demand for a headlining tour of big venues in the United States. It worked; in 1974, Bowie played arenas across the country, including two shows at Madison Square Garden.Bowie’s exit was an opportunistic hoax, but other retirements may be sincere at the moment they’re made. In 1977, Elton John announced he was done touring while onstage at Wembley Stadium in London. Though he was back two years later, he talked repeatedly about retiring, and in 2014, he told a French crowd, “No more shows, no more music.” The next day, his representative assured a reporter, “Elton was only joking.” In September 2018, the singer started his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, which ended in July 2023 and grossed $939 million, based on figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. So far, he hasn’t reneged.Saying a dramatic goodbye is good business, and so is the Lazarus return. It’s easy to speculate that money is the chief motivation, but there are other reasons, too. “I’ve got a family I never go home to,” Ozzy Osbourne said when he retired in 1992. Three years later, he was back with a Retirement Sucks tour, leaving fans to speculate about how much or little he enjoyed getting to know his family.The retirement ruse is common among hard rock bands (Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Scorpions, Black Sabbath), but other perpetrators of the old switcheroo include the Who, Cher, Meatloaf, Tina Turner, Barbra Streisand, Phish and LCD Soundsystem, who made a documentary about its farewell in 2011, only to return five years later. “I’d never want to be Gene Simmons, an old man who puts on makeup to entertain kids, like a clown going to work,” Trent Reznor told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in 2009, when he sent his band Nine Inch Nails into that good night. After four years, he unretired, which gave them something in common.After Bowie retired in 1973, then unretired in 1974, he retired a second time in 1975. A year later, the journalist Cameron Crowe interviewed him for Playboy and challenged the singer, asking how he could release a new album despite having retired twice.“I lie. It’s quite easy to do,” Bowie replied. “I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe.” More

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    Review: Daniel Barenboim Misses His American Swan Song

    The ailing conductor was to have led the Staatskapelle Berlin in Brahms’s symphonies at Carnegie Hall. Yannick Nézet-Séguin jumped in.On Jan. 20, 1957, a 14-year-old pianist named Daniel Barenboim made his Carnegie Hall debut, playing a Prokofiev concerto. In 1968, just 25, he appeared at the hall for the first time as a conductor.Some 150 Carnegie performances later, Barenboim, now 81 and one of the great musical figures of our time, was to have returned this week to conduct the Staatskapelle Berlin in Brahms’s four symphonies over two evenings, Thursday and Friday.But earlier this year, health issues forced him from the Staatskapelle’s podium, where he had reigned since the early 1990s. And while he had still hoped to travel to Carnegie with the orchestra as part of a four-city North American tour, those health problems ended up making the trip impossible. It would have been a poignant American swan song for Barenboim, bringing him not just to Carnegie but also to Chicago, where he led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1991 to 2006.In September, Christian Thielemann, 64, a master of Austro-German classics like Brahms’s symphonies, was named Barenboim’s replacement at the Staatskapelle, which is also the pit orchestra of the Berlin State Opera. But Thielemann couldn’t take on the tour.Instead, the ensemble looked to younger conductors: Giedre Slekyte for a performance in Toronto; Jakub Hrusa in Chicago; and, in New York and Philadelphia, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera (where he’s currently leading “Florencia en el Amazonas”) and the Philadelphia Orchestra.Nézet-Séguin has been Carnegie’s omnipresent man of late, appearing at the hall two dozen times since fall 2021 alone. And he’s been a dependable luxury substitute there, having jumped in for three dates with the Vienna Philharmonic at the dawn of the Russian war in Ukraine last year, when Valery Gergiev was forced off the programs under pressure.This was a shotgun wedding — “spontaneous,” as Nézet-Séguin put it in remarks from the podium at the end of the first Staatskapelle concert on Thursday, thanking the orchestra and sending good wishes to Barenboim. Nézet-Séguin hadn’t led the ensemble in 10 years, and it felt that way: sometimes excitingly volatile, sometimes unsettled.Brahms’s first and second symphonies were featured on the program, with the third and fourth to follow on Friday and in Philadelphia on Sunday. This orchestra is experienced in balancing Brahms’s winding, saturnine lines with his restless energy; the violins irradiate these scores, with a sound under pressure that’s slicing and white hot but never harsh.In the First Symphony, Nézet-Séguin nudged the ensemble toward slower slows and faster fasts, with high-wire, occasionally vague or nervous transitions between sections in the first movement. In the second movement, the strings glowed as they surrounded the wind solos. And while the soft initial statement of the brass chorale in the finale was seductively transparent, with each instrument’s layer audible in the sedimentary whole, that chorale’s restatement at the end was breathlessly sped through.The brighter-spirited Second Symphony felt more comfortably lived in, with a glistening, lightly frosted, even dreamlike sound in the first movement. The opening of the second was lovingly conducted, with a modest dignity to the theme and vigor in the rest.It would have been meaningful to be able to show our gratitude to Barenboim this week: for all the performances, for all the recordings, for all the sense he has conveyed that classical musicians can and should be vital parts of civic life.His albums, of course, will remain with us. Hopefully, so will the institutions he founded, like the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a project he conceived with Edward Said and dedicated to breaking down barriers in the Middle East.We in New York are left thinking back to what will likely end up being his final Carnegie appearances: a triumphant Bruckner cycle with the Staatskapelle in 2017, nine concerts in which he paired those sprawling symphonies with Mozart piano concertos, conducted from the keyboard. This was the king in full, thrilling command, the way he would want to be remembered.Staatskapelle BerlinThe orchestra will play Brahms at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan on Friday and at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia on Sunday; philorch.org. More

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    Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in December: ‘Reacher,’ ‘Doctor Who’ and More

    Holiday fare arrives, with “Candy Cane Lane,” and “Dr. Who” and “Shape Island” specials. “Percy Jackson” and “Culprits” also land this month.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of December’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Candy Cane Lane’Starts streaming: Dec. 1Eddie Murphy reunites with his “Boomerang” director Reginald Hudlin for this fantastical, special-effects-driven holiday comedy. Murphy plays Chris Carver, a suburbanite whose obsession with winning his neighborhood’s lights and display contest leads to him making a deal with a malevolent elf named Pepper (Jillian Bell), who secretly plans to trap her new client permanently in the form of a plastic figurine. When Pepper’s dark magic leads to every gift in the song “The 12 Days of Christmas” coming to life and wreaking havoc in the Carver family’s quaint community, Chris and his wife, Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross), have to enlist their children and Pepper’s previous victims to try and prevent the spell from ruining Christmas.‘Reacher’ Season 2Starts streaming: Dec. 15Alan Ritchson returns as the hulking, nomadic ex-military policeman Jack Reacher, for a second season of mystery-unraveling and bone crunching. This batch of episodes is based on Lee Child’s novel “Bad Luck and Trouble,” and sees the beefy do-gooder calling on some old colleagues — Frances Neagley (Maria Sten), Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan) and David O’Donnell (Shaun Sipos) — to help him figure out who is killing the members of Reacher’s former U.S. Army MP Special Investigations unit. As with Season 1, this latest round of “Reacher” combines fisticuffs and shootouts with scenes of friends and strangers alike marveling at the eccentricities and capabilities of the stoic hero.Also arriving:Dec. 6“Hollywood Houselift With Jeff Lewis” Season 2Dec. 7“Coach Prime” Season 2Dec. 8“Merry Little Batman”Dec. 12“The Farads” Season 1Circle (voiced by Gideon Adlon), Square (voiced by Harvey Guillen) and Triangle (voiced by Scott Adsit) in “Shape Island: The Winter Blues,” a holiday special.Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Shape Island: The Winter Blues’Starts streaming: Dec. 1Based on a series of picture books by the author Mac Barnett and the illustrator Jon Klassen, the charming animated series “Shape Island” teaches young kids about friendship via quiet, simple stories about three very different shapes: the nerdy Square (voiced by Harvey Guillén), the goofy Triangle (Scott Adsit) and the cool and wise Circle (Gideon Adlon). In the holiday special “The Winter Blues,” Circle and Triangle try to cheer Square up by inventing a monster-themed holiday; but they struggle to maintain the illusion when their pal starts asking too many questions about the magical yeti they created. The show’s adorable sets and characters look even more enchanting covered in ice and snow, though as always the core appeal is the interactions between these three, who reap the rewards of companionship by making an extra effort to get along.Also arriving:Dec. 1“Frog and Toad: Christmas Eve”“The Snoopy Show: Happiness Is Holiday Traditions”Dec. 6“John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial”Dec. 15“The Family Plan”From left: Leah Sava Jeffries, Aryan Simhadri and Walker Scobell in “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.”Disney+New to Disney+“Percy Jackson and the Olympians” Season 1Starts streaming: Dec. 20A decade ago, when pretty much every popular young adult fantasy fiction series was being adapted into megahit movies, the first two books in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson saga hit the big screen. Both did OK with audiences, but neither became a sensation on the level of the Harry Potter or Hunger Games films. So Riordan and the writer-producer Jonathan E. Steinberg are now trying something different with the novels, starting over at the beginning and telling Percy’s story as a Disney+ TV show. Walker Scobell plays the young hero, who discovers he is the secret son of Poseidon. Percy joins forces with other gods, demigods and magical creatures for adventures that bring the perils of ancient myths into the modern world.“Doctor Who Holiday Special: The Church on Ruby Road”Starts streaming: Dec. 25For the 60th anniversary of the long-running British science-fiction series “Doctor Who,” the show’s former writer-producer Russell T Davies is overseeing a series of specials that feature — for a brief stretch — the return of the actor David Tennant, playing a new version of the time-traveling Doctor he had previously played from 2005 to 2010. Disney+ will be carrying all three of those specials (“The Star Beast,” “Wild Blue Yonder” and “The Giggle”); and then with that nostalgia trip out of the way, Davies will begin the new “Doctor Who” season with a holiday-themed special, “The Church on Ruby Road,” which will properly introduce the next Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa. Details about what Davies has planned are being kept under wraps for now; but fans of the franchise are looking forward to some of the series’ biggest changes in years.Also arriving:Dec. 1“The Shepherd”Dec. 2“Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder”Dec. 8“Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Christmas Cabin Fever”Dec. 9“Doctor Who: The Giggle”Dec. 22“What If…?” Season 2From left: Tara Abboud, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Gemma Arterton and Kirby in “Culprits.”Des Willie/DisneyNew to Hulu‘Culprits’ Season 1Starts streaming: Dec. 8The writer-director J Blakeson — best-known for the clever thriller films “The Disappearance of Alice Creed” and “I Care a Lot” — adapts the crime fiction anthology “Culprits: The Heist Was Just the Beginning” into a pulpy, structurally complex series, set in the aftermath of a caper. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett plays an aspiring restaurateur who is living a peaceful life with his fiancé when he discovers that someone is trying to kill everyone who was involved in a heist he participated in years ago. Each “Culprits” episode jumps between the present day and the past, filling in the details about the original crime, which was masterminded by a hyper-controlling boss (Gemma Arterton). The show is partly a mystery and partly a character study, considering the long-term effects of a criminal gang’s big score.‘The Mission’Starts streaming: Dec. 8Back in 2018, the Christian missionary John Allen Chau made international news when he was killed while illegally trying to make contact with a secluded island tribe. The National Geographic documentary “The Mission” digs beneath all the online jokes and outraged reactions to Chau’s death, offering a more thoughtful reflection on who this young man was — and a more detailed consideration of how the drive to convert hostile strangers has had a long and often tragic history. The film’s co-directors, Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (who previously made the excellent documentary “Boys State”), bring a fair-minded approach throughout, taking fervent faith seriously while also acknowledging the damage it can do.Also arriving:Dec. 6“We Live Here: The Midwest”Dec. 9“Maestra”Dec. 11“Science Fair: The Series”Dec. 13“Moving” Season 1“Undead Unlock” Season 1Dec. 14“Blue Jean”“Dragons: The Nine Realms” Season 8Dec. 15“CMA Country Christmas”“Such Brave Girls” Season 1Dec. 18“Archer: Into the Cold”Dec. 20“Dragons of Wonderhatch” Season 1Dec. 22“Maggie Moore(s)”Dec. 26“Letterkenny” Season 12Carol and Charles Stuart, as seen in “Murder In Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning.” Ira Wyman/Sygma via Getty Images/HBONew to Max‘Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning’Starts streaming: Dec. 4In 1989, a woman named Carol Stuart was shot and killed in Boston. During the investigation into the murder, her husband, Chuck, described the shooter as a Black man. It was later discovered that he wasn’t being entirely truthful; but by the time the case was closed, the city’s long-simmering racial hostilities had boiled over. Directed by Jason Hehir (best-known for the Emmy-winning Chicago Bulls docu-series “The Last Dance”), the three-part “Murder in Boston” features archival news footage and new interviews that, working in conjunction, explain what the cultural environment was like in Boston in the 1970s and ’80s and how the Stuart case represented a turning point.Also arriving:Dec. 5“Great Photo, Lovely Life: Facing a Family’s Secrets”Dec. 12“Trees and Other Entanglements”Dec. 16“Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?”Dec. 21“Gary Gulman: Born on 3rd Base”Dec. 28“Oprah and ‘The Color Purple’ Journey”Dec. 30“Time Bomb Y2K”Michael Jackson, center, in the documentary “Thriller 40.” Paramount+ with SHOWTIMENew to Paramount+ with Showtime‘Thriller 40’Starts streaming: Dec. 2The director Nelson George’s “Thriller 40” goes deep on one of the best-selling albums of all time, serving as an unofficial conclusion to a trilogy that was begun by Spike Lee’s two Michael Jackson documentaries (one about the years leading up to “Off the Wall,” and one about the making of “Bad”). George and his crew interview some of the personnel who worked on the “Thriller” LP and its groundbreaking music videos; and they also speak with some famous fans (including Usher, Misty Copeland, Mark Ronson and Mary J. Blige), who talk passionately about what “Thriller” means to them. The main selling point for this documentary, though, is all of the rare video and audio from the studio, where Jackson and his producer Quincy Jones shaped the songs that would go on to dominate the pop charts, expanding the commercial and creative possibilities for Black artists.Also arriving:Dec. 1“The World According to Football”Dec. 5“Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too?”Dec. 7“The Envoys” Season 2Dec. 8“Baby Shark’s Big Movie”Dec. 11“The Billion Dollar Goal”Dec. 12“Born in Synanon”Dec. 15“Finestkind”Tony Shalhoub returns as Adrian Monk in “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie.”Peter Stranks/PEACOCKNew to Peacock‘Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie’Starts streaming: Dec. 8Fourteen years after the USA Network’s long-running, Emmy-winning detective dramedy “Monk” aired its series finale, most of the cast returns for this sequel movie, which catches fans up on how the obsessive-compulsive sleuth Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) has been doing in the decade since he finally solved his wife’s murder. In short? Not great! Rattled by the pandemic and feeling adrift without murders to investigate, Monk finds a renewed sense of purpose when someone close to his family dies under mysterious circumstances, possibly at the direction of an arrogant billionaire (James Purefoy). In “Mr. Monk’s Last Case,” Monk once again has to overcome his neuroses with the help of his friends and former colleagues, working together to make the world feel a little saner.Also arriving:Dec. 1“The Exorcist: Believer”Dec. 8“Christmas at the Opry”Dec. 12“Barry Manilow’s a Very Barry Christmas”Dec. 15“A Saturday Night Live Christmas Special”Dec. 21“Dr. Death” Season 2 More