Aurelia Butler

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

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

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicA few weeks ago, Jung Kook — a member of the world-beating K-pop group BTS — released his solo debut album, “Golden,” a sleek affair notable for high-profile collaborators on its tracks and behind the scenes, as well as for the fact that it’s sung fully in English.That’s a logical extension of the shift undertaken by BTS beginning in the late 2010s and into the early 2020s, when it became the biggest pop act in the world, and focused its energies on the American marketplace. But it also is part of a longer story about how K-pop has been expanding its global reach, which has in turn altered the priorities of some of its biggest stars and record labels.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about K-pop’s long march to American awareness and embrace, the earlier acts that began making inroads with American pop audiences, and whether there’s a point at which K-pop delivered fully in English ceases to be K-pop at all.Guest:Kara, host of the Idol Cast PodcastConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

The Russian maestro, who heads the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, will also control the Bolshoi in Moscow, replacing Vladimir Urin, who spoke out against the Ukraine war.Valery Gergiev, the star Russian maestro and prominent supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin, was tapped on Friday to lead the storied Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, the Russian government announced .The move will expand Mr. Gergiev’s dominance at the pinnacle of Russia culture. He already serves as the artistic and general director of the nation’s other premier performing arts institution, the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. In Moscow, he will replace Vladimir Urin, the Bolshoi’s general director since 2013, who signed a petition last year expressing opposition to the war in Ukraine.Russia’s government said in a post on Telegram that Mr. Gergiev would serve a five-year term under an order signed by Prime Minister Mikhail V. Mishustin. The post said that Mr. Urin had been “relieved of this position at his own request.”In selecting Mr. Gergiev, 70, to lead the Bolshoi, Mr. Putin has rewarded a renowned musician and staunch ally who once endorsed his re-election and has appeared at concerts in Russia and abroad to promote his policies. The men have known each other since the early 1990s, when Mr. Putin was an official in St. Petersburg and Mr. Gergiev was beginning his tenure as the leader of the Mariinsky, then called the Kirov.Mr. Urin’s fate at the Bolshoi, which houses renowned ballet and opera companies, had been uncertain since his name appeared on the petition opposing the war. Mr. Putin at times seemed to hint that Mr. Urin’s days were numbered; in March 2022 he publicly asked Mr. Gergiev if he was interested in “recreating a common directorate” that would unite the Bolshoi with the Mariinsky.But Mr. Urin, 76, defied expectations for a time, maintaining his post even as other artists who denounced the war faced reprisals or left the country. He said in an interview with a Russian news outlet earlier this year that it was “not an easy time” for the Bolshoi.Mr. Urin announced his resignation to colleagues on Thursday after a performance of César Cui’s “The Mandarin’s Son” and Stravinsky’s “The Nightingale” at the Bolshoi, Russian news outlets reported.“Today I say goodbye to you, because today is my last working day at the Bolshoi Theater,” Mr. Urin said in a speech to his colleagues, according to a video that circulated online.After Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Gergiev, whose extensive international career once made him one of the busiest maestros in the world, has been persona non grata in the United States and Europe. His touring schedule dried up in the West, and he was fired by the Munich Philharmonic, where he had been chief conductor, because of his long record of support for Mr. Putin.After the invasion, many cultural institutions in the United States and Europe rushed to cut ties with Russian artists and institutions closely aligned with Mr. Putin, upending decades of cultural exchange that had endured even during the depths of the Cold War.The Bolshoi and Mariinsky theaters faced cancellations of performances set for London, Madrid, New York and elsewhere, and a popular program to broadcast Bolshoi performances into more than 1,700 movie theaters in 70 countries and territories was suspended. Licenses to perform foreign works at Russian theaters expired, and some Russian choreographers and directors asked that their names be removed from works performed in Russia. Several Russian stars with ties to Mr. Putin lost work in the West, including the soprano Anna Netrebko and the pianist Denis Matsuev.Mr. Urin, who played a key role in steering the Bolshoi after the shock of the 2013 acid attack on the ballet director Sergei Filin, tried to maintain a sense of normalcy, pushing forward with performances of classics like the ballet “Giselle” and the opera “Eugene Onegin.” But the war created new complications. He said at one point that he could not stage works by artists who spoke out against the invasion because it might create a “serious negative reaction,” according to Russian news reports.Demand for performances at the Bolshoi and Mariinsky has appeared to remain strong. A stampede broke out outside the Bolshoi last month as several hundred people lined up to buy tickets for a popular holiday run of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” according to Russian news outlets.With the West off limits, the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky have turned to other overseas markets, including China, where Russian artists and cultural groups have been warmly received. Mr. Gergiev and the Mariinsky have led three tours in China this year; the Bolshoi appeared in Beijing over the summer.Alex Marshall More

Inspired by an Instagram account dedicated to AIDS, the singer mounts a moving and trenchant piece of political theater for her “Celebration” tour.Shining out from the Instagram slag heap, amid the endless A.I. selfies and reaction reels, is an account so quiet in presence and noble in intention that it is sometimes hard to believe it exists. The account, The AIDS Memorial, is an evolving testament, told in photographs, videos and user stories, to lives lost to a devastating and, it can occasionally seem, forgotten epidemic.The stories and photos are of lovers, parents, children, relatives, acquaintances and friends taken by the disease, and they are edited — and more generally guided into existence — by one man, Stuart Armstrong, from his home outside Edinburgh. To date, Mr. Armstrong has posted more than 11,000 of these tales, and if you are aware of them at all, that may owe to one woman: Madonna.The 65-year-old singer was early among the 269,000 followers of The AIDS Memorial. And, if it did not inspire her outright, the Instagram account served as the basis for a showstopping element of her current “Celebration” tour, which comes to Barclays Center in mid-December. That is, a photo montage depicting a fraction of the 40 million people who, according to World Health Organization statistics, have succumbed to the disease.“One of the most successful and important works of AIDS art in our time,” the writer Sarah Schulman — whose 2012 memoir, titled “The Gentrification of the Mind,” depicts 1980s New York in the grip of AIDS — said of The Aids Memorial. By extension, Madonna’s choice to deploy the montage early in each “Celebration” performance as a backdrop for a rendition of the 1986 song “Live to Tell” is as politically trenchant as it is deeply personal. The first image in what proliferates into a vast photo mosaic is of Madonna’s close friend Martin Burgoyne, the British-born artist who managed the singer’s first club tour and who died of AIDS-related complications in 1986 at 23.“One of the things she was saying was that she wanted to pay tribute not just to friends and famous people but to all the people who were lost to the disease,” said Sasha Kasiuha, 29, a Ukraine-born director commissioned by Madonna to orchestrate the video effects. What she also aimed for, Mr. Kasiuha said, was an evocation of the terrors that prevailed in New York and elsewhere during the period from the disease’s first mention in The New York Times in 1981 as an unnamed outbreak of “rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals” to the mid-2000s, when AIDS deaths peaked.Not only did major American metropolises become graveyards, as Madonna (who did not respond to requests to her representatives for comment) posted to her own Instagram account, a significant number of those affected by the disease in the days when a positive H.I.V. diagnosis equaled a death sentence, suffered dreadfully, becoming pariahs as they experienced what the singer characterized as destitution and abandonment by their families.“Two generations of incredible artists were decimated, along with the audiences that understood that art … all gone,” said the D.J. Honey Dijon, who has opened for Madonna on several “Celebration” tour dates. “I think of Madonna and what she lost and endured, and I think her perseverance is admirable.”“They just died and died and died,” Stuart Armstrong said in 2017.Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Live NationBut it was not only artists, as Ms. Schulman said, or people of note. It was ordinary folks from all walks of life and of every gender orientation, so many dead (more than 100,000 in New York City alone) that even memory of them has tended to be erased. “It’s up to the living to carry their name,” she said.Almost by default, the task of keeping those names and remembrances alive in a largely amnesiac culture fell to volunteers like Mr. Armstrong.“I had a personal affinity for the subject, but I kept trying to avoid it,” he said, declining to elucidate. “I thought, I’ll just post a few and see what happens, and then it went on and on and on.”The original 1,000 followers multiplied exponentially after the account was cited in i-D magazine in 2017, where Mr. Armstrong said of the disease’s casualties, “They just died and died and died.”As the numbers grew, so, too, did the stories of women, men and trans people, celebrated or anonymous, some as famous as Freddie Mercury, others as obscure as John Schultz, a writer and apparent hell-rake whose best friend, Katrina del Mar, vividly remembered being eighty-sixed with him at nightspots — like Boots & Saddle and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut — across the city.“Huge emotional moment during Madonna’s #LivetoTell, her moving tribute to all those lost to AIDS especially those that had touched her life,” wrote the Soft Cell singer Marc Almond on Instagram. “When Martin Burgoyne’s face appeared on a huge screen, I’m not ashamed to say that I had tears running down my face.”There are tales of men like Bill Powell of Knoxville, Tenn., “a savior of old buildings, stray dogs and lost souls”; of April Renee Dunaway, seen on Instagram and now in Madonna’s tour performances as a young mother, holding aloft her infant and posted to the account by her child, now the drag performer #trinitythetuck.It was back in April that Madonna’s team began working quietly with Mr. Armstrong to contact and obtain from the original contributors consent to include personal images of their loved ones in the “Celebration” tour. Among the goals, Mr. Kasiuha said, was saving a community marginalized in life from being banished altogether from cultural memory.“Younger audience born after the ’90s didn’t have to experience or know much about what was happening, that feeling of having friends, family all around them dying,” he said. “We wanted to go from the big, strong portraits to images that got smaller and smaller so you could begin to understand the scale.”In all, roughly 300 of these drawn from The AIDS Memorial. And at every performance, as a raft of YouTube videos attest, the emotional reaction has been similar. “People are overwhelmed,” Mr. Kasiuha said. “That was something Madonna emphasized. She wanted to remind people of how precious life is.” More

Met officials were forced to bring down the curtain halfway through the opera as protesters unfurled banners that read “No Opera On A Dead Planet.” The performance later resumed.The opening night of a revival of Richard Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York was interrupted Thursday night by climate protesters shouting “No Opera” from the balconies on both sides of the opera house.Protesters with the group Extinction Rebellion NYC unfurled banners that read “No Opera On A Dead Planet,” according to Peter Gelb, the general manager at the Met. Met officials were then forced to bring down the curtain at around 9:30 p.m., halfway through the second act.About eight minutes passed before security officials ushered out the protesters perched on the balconies, Mr. Gelb said.The crowd jeered the demonstrators and burst into applause when the curtains again opened, but the elation was short-lived.A woman sitting in the orchestra section of the audience then stood up and began to shout.The curtains closed again. While security removed the woman, Mr. Gelb consulted with other officials on how to proceed.Many audience members shouted back at the protesters, with people screaming “Go away!” “Go home!” and “Shut up!” Some attendees walked out, with one person questioning “is there no security here?”The show was delayed for 22 minutes, Mr. Gelb said.Mr. Gelb appeared onstage to inform the audience that the house lights would remain on so security could quickly identify and remove any additional protesters who might pop up during the rest of the four-and-half-hour performance.The production was scheduled to end shortly after 11 p.m. but will instead end closer to midnight because of the interruptions.Mr. Gelb said the protesters were removed from the premises and referred to the police.A New York Police Department spokesman said no arrests were reported.The return of Otto Schenk’s classic production was eagerly anticipated among opera goers because it marked the Met debut of the highly-sought-after baritone Christian Gerhaher, who sang the role of Wolfram. The Austrian tenor Andreas Schager sang the title role, Elza van den Heever was Elisabeth and the opera was conducted by Donald Runnicles.In a statement, Extinction Rebellion said the demonstration was timed to “coincide with the main character’s declaration that ‘love is a spring to be drunk from.’”It added: “contrary to those words spoken on stage, springs are not pure now, because we are in a climate crisis, and our water is contaminated.”“Everyone was just so startled,” said George Chauncey, a history professor at Columbia University, who was seated in the orchestra section. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.”Mr. Chauncey said some audience members were concerned about their safety, while others were annoyed that opening night was interrupted.“I agree there’s a climate emergency and I understand the frustration that leads people to do something like this,” he said. “But I’m not sure it’s very effective.”Before the show, several demonstrators were at the house protesting the Israel-Hamas war, including Nan Goldin, the photographer and activist.Thursday’s interruption was just the latest example of climate activists disrupting a classical music concert.In September, climate activists interrupted a performance in Switzerland. And last year during a performance of Verdi’s Requiem in Amsterdam, according to Opera Wire, climate activists shouted: “We are in the middle of a climate crisis and we are like the orchestra on the Titanic that keeps playing quietly while the ship is already sinking.” They were escorted out minutes later.Climate activists have also targeted museums, sometimes harming paintings, and interrupted sporting events. In September, Extinction Rebellion NYC also interrupted the U.S. Open semifinal match between Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova. Four protesters in the upper levels of Arthur Ashe Stadium called for an end to fossil fuels, and one activist glued his feet to the ground. Their protests delayed the match for 49 minutes.Javier C. Hernández More

Hall has accused Oates of committing the “ultimate partnership betrayal” when he moved to sell off his portion of a joint venture. Oates denies wrongdoing.The nature of the dispute between Daryl Hall and John Oates, which had been obscured in sealed court documents, became clearer on Thursday as one of pop music’s most recognizable and long-running duos put their fight in front of a judge in Nashville.Details of the collapse of the 50-year artistic collaboration and business partnership between the two had been trickling out for days in court papers submitted before Thursday’s hearing in Chancery Court, where Hall and Oates were represented by lawyers but did not appear.Hall, the lead singer and songwriter for many of the band’s hits, is arguing that Oates violated their contract by moving to sell his portion of one of their business partnerships without Hall’s approval.Hall’s lawyers went to court to block any sale while their business disagreement goes through a separate arbitration process. On Thursday, Chancellor Russell T. Perkins granted their request, preventing Oates from going further in the agreement until the arbitrator resolves the impasse, or until Feb. 17.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More