Aurelia Butler

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    For 50 Years, Emanuel Ax Has Made Music Sound Simply Right

    Understated and unarrogant, Ax can be taken for granted. But he has long been, and continues to be, one of the finest American pianists.“A young pianist with the hard-to-forget name of Emanuel Ax has one thing going for him before he plays a note,” the New York Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1973. “But brand identification, as advertising men term it, helps in the long run only if the product delivers, and Mr. Ax’s recital at Alice Tully Hall on Monday night fortunately carried the stamp of quality.”The occasion was Ax’s New York debut, and it was the opening flourish of a banner few years. At the Marlboro Festival in Vermont that summer, Ax gave his first concert with Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist he has spent his career playing and quipping with, the friend who calls him “the big brother I never had.” Soon, there was a date on the Young Concert Artists series, a Carnegie Hall appearance, a victory in the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and, in February 1975, an eloquent first recording.That stamp of quality had become indelible, and it has since endured. Of course, Ax, 74, protests that the half-century career he has enjoyed following that inaugural hometown bow has been largely the product of good fortune. Never mind his Avery Fisher Prize or his 19 Grammy nominations (and eight wins), his long list of premieres or his generosity and ease as a chamber music partner to Ma and other eager collaborators. Even now, Ax will only reluctantly allow that he has much talent at all.“I just started, and I stuck to it; I liked it,” Ax said of playing the piano during a recent interview at Tanglewood, where he was joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a Brahms concerto as he has many, many times before. “I think the sheer enjoyment of it is a talent in itself.”From left, Leonidas Kavakos, Ax and Yo-Yo Ma, who as a trio have been working their way through arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies.Hilary ScottThat’s Manny, as everyone calls him. He has said things like this forever, sought to share the spotlight or point it wholly elsewhere. And his modesty, which he wraps in a jesting smile and a famous bonhomie, is at the heart of his pianism and personality alike.“Whatever his musical decisions are, they are never ones that would draw attention to himself,” said the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has known Ax for four decades and will premiere a piano concerto by Anders Hillborg with him and the San Francisco Symphony in October. “So in the very, very best sense of the word, he kind of eradicates himself out of the picture.”Might that mean, though, that Ax is taken for granted? After all, how many artists have performed at his level for so long? How many have treated us so reliably to such taste and good sense as he? How many have had his ability, not unlike that of his late associate Bernard Haitink, to make music sound so simply right?Ax ranks among the very finest of American pianists. Yet he would never admit it. As Ma put it, “He doesn’t go around saying, ‘And I did this.’” In fact, Ma recalled, when Ax told him that this article was happening, he said, “I don’t know why they’re doing this.”“I told him it’s because he’s old,” Ma said, bursting into laughter.Ma, left, and Ax in 1989.PhotofestMa — who, aside from the pianist Yoko Nozaki, Ax’s wife since 1974, has probably heard him play more than anyone — has a theory about why Ax is the way he is. “One thing that I can safely say, over the 50 years I’ve known him, is that he operates by a very strict code of conduct,” he said.The code, Ma went on, means that Ax never speaks ill of other pianists, and does what he can to bolster them instead. He insists on being kind, on looking at the brighter side of things. He goes to unusual lengths to build trust with fellow performers because the music, in the end, depends on it.“Somewhere along the line, he saw some things that he didn’t like, and he decided that he was not going to be that,” Ma explained. “He’s seen the consequences, and that’s why the code of conduct exists. It’s not some arbitrary thing.”AX WAS BORN in the Soviet Union in 1949, in what is now Lviv, Ukraine — though he still calls it Lwów, the Polish name it held in the interwar years. During the Holocaust, his parents, Joachim and Hellen, survived the concentration camps but lost, he said, “everybody.” They wed after the war and left for Warsaw when Ax was 7. He didn’t return to Lviv until six years ago, when he visited at the invitation of Philippe Sands, whose book “East West Street” movingly recounts the history of that contested city.Ax as a boy.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAx with his parents, who left the Soviet Union and eventually settled in the United States.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesAx said that he only really remembered the opera house where he had first heard music, but Ma has heard him talk about a darker recollection, too: “I think he remembers a big parade in the town, and he knew the exact spot where it was. He backtracked and realized that that must have been when Stalin had died.”Warsaw led to Winnipeg, and Winnipeg to Manhattan, where the family settled into an apartment on the roof of a building across the street from Carnegie Hall. Ax was 12, and the hall, where he will play works by Beethoven and Schoenberg in April, became his playground. “I haunted the place,” he said.Great pianists crossed his path, older ones like Artur Rubinstein and younger artists such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, and he speaks of them with the excitement of a fan and the insight of a colleague. For Emil Gilels, he reserves telling enthusiasm.“I think he’s in a way the most sane pianist,” Ax said. “It’s so direct, absolutely self-confident, unarrogant, logical, beautiful, and just done just right. You walk out and you say, ‘That’s the way it should be.’ Of course, then you hear Richter, and you say, ‘No, that’s the way it should be.’ And then you hear Horowitz.”Ax studied at Juilliard with Mieczyslaw Munz, and endured several competitions before he triumphed in the Rubinstein. Even then, his virtues were not those typical of winners. For all his “dream technique,” as a critic described it in 1975, he immediately seemed a deeper musician than most. “His interpretations are warm, solid and straightforward,” Tim Page wrote in The Times in 1985, styling him as “a deeply satisfying pianist” — traits you can hear on his recording of the Chopin “Ballades” from the same year, or his later Haydn and Brahms.Ax performing with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2011; the two will be reunited when they premiere a new concerto with the San Francisco Symphony in October.Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesIf consistency has been Ax’s hallmark, he has never been entirely reducible to type. He dabbled with period instruments for a while, joining Charles Mackerras and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to record the Chopin concertos with brilliance and verve; his dedication to new music, which has seen him premiere scores by composers including John Adams and Missy Mazzoli, has been striking for a pianist of his stature.“I don’t think he sees it as a duty,” Salonen said of Ax’s commitment to contemporary works. “I think he thinks it’s normal. He thinks this is something that musicians do.”Chamber music, though, was with Ax from the start. He studied with the legendary tutor Felix Galimir as a teenager, then went on to form, among other groups, his duo with Ma, a piano trio with Ma and Isaac Stern, a piano quartet with the addition of Jaime Laredo, and, most recently, another trio with Ma and Leonidas Kavakos, with whom he is working his way through arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies.Ax’s fundamental approach to chamber music reflects his “devotion to where he landed, and to the aspirations of the system,” Ma said, to “the idea of republicanism, that you can be not hierarchical.” Their relationship was forged on jokes told in the Juilliard cafeteria, where they met when Ma was 15 and Ax was 21, but also on an ideal of equality in shared music, Ma said; this, at a time when pianists were still billed as accompanists to stars, or spoken of in the possessive sense.And it is chamber music, or more precisely playing with friends, that keeps Ax from retiring. He thinks about it more than he used to, he said; he missed giving concerts during the pandemic, but he also felt liberated from the deep anxiety that has always come with them.Ax in 1973.Christian Steiner/YCA“I get very nervous when I play, and I really wish I could get over it,” Ax said, confiding that the feeling can be worse now than before. “It’s not even a musical worry, it’s more about getting things right, you know — wrong notes and things like that.”Ax is modest even about these strains; Ma compared the pressure that Ax has always felt to that suffered by Martha Argerich, whose stage fright and perfectionism have led her largely to abandon solo recitals. But he suspects that Ax is not there yet.“Something in me tells me that he’s not going to stop, because performing also does something for him that is a pillar in his life,” Ma said. “It’s solidifying. I wouldn’t say that it’s like he needs it, but there’s a mutuality that’s good.”Ask Ma what makes Ax special as a pianist, and he will say that it is how he gives music the sense that everything has been thought through. He will note how revealing it is that Ax so adores Brahms, whose works are all about restraint, about reaching for things that are kept out of reach. He will marvel, with more than a hint of exasperation, that Ax still practices for four hours a day, that he is still so prone to doubt; he will grant, though, that doubt serves a purpose in Ax’s life.“He experiences that — he lets himself experience that — because he doesn’t want to say, ‘I know everything,’” Ma said.But Ma will say all this only when asked to elaborate. Otherwise, when he answers the question of what defines Ax as a pianist, he responds with just one word.“Musicianship.”Ax, left, with students from Kids 4 Harmony at Tanglewood.Hilary Scott More

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    Children’s Movies to Stream: ‘The Super Mario Bros.Movie’ and More

    This month’s picks include a monkey’s quest, a splashy version of a beloved Nintendo franchise and a Lego adventure packed with Disney princesses.‘The Monkey King’Watch it on Netflix.This Netflix original is based on “Journey to the West,” a famous 16th-century Chinese novel written during the Ming dynasty. The story follows a magical monkey named Sun Wukong — voiced here by Jimmy O. Yang and referred to only as Monkey King — who is born from a rock and cast out by the other monkeys in the forest. Growing up, he longs to be one of the all-powerful Immortals. He goes on a quest to hell and back to defeat 100 demons, the requirement to fulfill his dream.The tale has been adapted for TV and games, and there’s an anime version, but this latest telling adds a character named Lin (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), a scrappy village girl who becomes the monkey’s traveling companion. They encounter Buddha (BD Wong) and demons like the frenetic, fearsome Dragon King (Bowen Yang, from “Saturday Night Live”), who occasionally breaks into song. The main character goes from a lovable, pitiful little simian to a self-centered trickster who steals a glowing magical staff (which looks and sounds a lot like a “Star Wars” light saber). He’s not exactly endearing (my son loved him, though), but the propulsive energy of his quest will entertain smaller kids who aren’t scared of characters who have gleaming red eyes and sharp teeth. Ron J. Friedman, Steve Bencich and Rita Hsiao wrote the script, and Anthony Stacchi (“The Boxtrolls,” “Open Season”) directed.‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’Watch it on Peacock.My son calls this movie “The Brothers Mario,” which sounds like another type of film entirely. This splashy big screen version of the beloved 1980s Nintendo franchise might not wow longtime fans of the game, but youngsters who will one day think the 1980s are ancient times should be wildly entertained.There was a 1993 live-action movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi, two Brooklyn brothers who work as plumbers and have to save the city from monsters. This time, the brothers inhabit a colorful animated world where Luigi (Charlie Day) becomes the prisoner of the evil Bowser (Jack Black), a dastardly villain who wants to wage war on Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her kingdom, and then marry her. With Luigi held captive, Mario (Chris Pratt) teams up with the princess, Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) to free Luigi and keep the princess safe.Yes, it’s a lot, but children who have no clue the games exist will still be able to follow the plot. When I asked my son why he loved the movie so much, his reply was simply, “I like the fighting.” So there you have it. Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic directed.‘Lego Disney Princess: The Castle Quest’Watch it on Disney+.If a smorgasbord of Disney princesses is what your kid needs, this 49-minute girl-power adventure — starring Ariel (voiced by Jodi Benson), Moana (Auli’i Cravalho), Tiana (Anika Noni Rose), Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) and Snow White (Katie Von Till) — should do the trick. An ominous storm brews, and the princesses are sent to a mysterious castle, where the dastardly Gaston (Richard White) holds King Triton (Jim Cummings) captive. Gaston plans to take over the kingdom of each princess, unless the five of them can complete a series of challenges, like getting Aladdin’s flying carpet and finding the Sundrop Flower in the Dark Forest. With their little claw-like Lego hands, the princesses follow Ariel’s cry of, “Let’s go slay all day, ladies!” — and set off on adventures across oceans and into the Dark Forest.There are plenty of fun references to the princess movies that came before (Gaston sings, “Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat!”) and a feisty Snow White reminds everyone, “I kept a house of seven bachelors orderly and on task!” The director Michael D. Black made several Lego shorts before taking this project on, and the screenplay by Jenny Lee and Rachel Vine leans into themes like the power of female friendship and the fact that girls — even those made of Legos — can slay.‘Rumble’Watch it on Amazon Prime Video.Imagine a planet where pro wrestlers are gigantic monsters instead of mere humans, and you have “Rumble,” a movie about an uncoordinated, out-of-shape underdog named Steve (voiced by Will Arnett) who takes on the sports world. The story is inspired by Rob Harrell’s graphic novel “Monster on the Hill,” which depicts a realm where each town is represented by a mighty monster, save for one town, where the not-so-menacing Steve lives.In this computer-animated film, a girl named Winnie (Geraldine Viswanathan) decides to coach Steve and turn him into a fearsome competitor who can restore glory to their town. Her dad used to coach monsters, so Winnie is trying to honor him by following in his footsteps. Hamish Grieve, who worked in the animation department on films like “Monsters vs. Aliens,” directs. There are fun training montages, shout-outs to movies like “Dirty Dancing,” and — most important for kids — humongous beasts wrestling each other. Steve and Winnie’s friendship also gives you two heroes to cheer.‘The Slumber Party’Watch it on Disney+.It starts with three teenage girls speeding through the streets of their quiet little town aboard a giant motorized hedgehog, and it only gets nuttier from there. Based on the book “The Sleepover,” by Jen Malone, this family-friendly riff on the “Hangover” franchise is about a sleepover birthday party that devolves into chaos when the girls wake up and realize their bestie Anna Maria (Valentina Herrera) is missing — and they don’t remember a thing. Of course booze, drugs and gambling are not to blame for the blackout. Instead, the girls had surprised Anna Maria with a magician called Mesmer (Tituss Burgess) who had hypnotized them all. And when they wake up, Megan (Darby Camp from “Big Little Lies”) discovers she has a shaved eyebrow and is wearing a hoodie that belongs to the hottest guy in school, Jake (Ramon Jose Rodriguez). The action kicks up when the girls embark on a quest to find Anna Maria (you’ll have to watch the movie to find out how they wind up on that hedgehog).There are plenty of comic moments courtesy of Camp’s Megan and her sleepover pals, Veronica (Alex Cooper Cohen) and Paige (Emmy Liu-Wang), and the writer Eydie Faye (“Fuller House”) and the director Veronica Rodriguez succeed in capturing the sweetness and absurdity of growing up. More

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    Stream These Great Movies Before They Leave Netflix in September

    This month’s losses for U.S. subscribers include some of the most beloved titles and characters ever to grace a screen.The titles leaving Netflix in the United States are a real smorgasbord this month, from genre movies to children’s fare to two of the most beloved Oscar winners in cinematic history. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Colette’ (Sept. 12)You may think you know what you’re getting when you click “play” on a period literary biopic starring Keira Knightley — but the director Wash Westmoreland is delightfully uninterested in hewing to expectations. This is no ordinary period literary biopic, because the French writer Colette was no period literary figure; she was an ahead-of-her time scribe and an unapologetically bisexual hedonist whose lust for life made for especially lively prose. Knightley is clearly having a good time subverting her prim-and-proper persona, while Dominic West is deliciously doofy as the man who brings her out of her shell before receding into her long shadow.Stream it here.‘Annihilation’ (Sept. 29)The writer and director Alex Garland is a rare creator of science fiction who truly seems interested in the “science” piece of the puzzle; unlike many of his contemporaries, who use the tools of futuristic fare as window dressing for mediocre action and adventure, he crafts films of ideas, approaching the possibilities of future technologies and alien interactions with contemplation and intellectual heft. Like his “Ex Machina” before it, this adaptation of the novel by Jeff VanderMeer is also as interested in character as it is in genre (if not more so), focusing on a biologist (a fine, and occasionally ferocious, Natalie Portman) who is investigating a possible alien life force while also grappling with the recent death of her husband (Oscar Isaac). Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson round out the cast.Stream it here.‘Clear and Present Danger’ (Sept. 30)Harrison Ford’s second outing as Tom Clancy’s venerable hero Jack Ryan is a tense, well-crafted geopolitical thriller. Newly appointed as the C.I.A.’s acting deputy director, Ryan uncovers a scorcher of a secret: a covert war, conducted by intelligence operatives against a Columbian drug cartel, authorized at the top levels of the U.S. government. Willem Dafoe, Joaquim de Almeida and the “Mission: Impossible” favorite Henry Czerny are among the evil-doers, while James Earl Jones returns as Ryan’s boss and confidante. Ford’s “Patriot Games” director, Phillip Noyce, also returns, a director so deft at putting together a suspense sequence that he manages to generate nail-biting tension with a scene about deleting some files.Stream it here.‘Lawless’ (Sept. 30)The director John Hillcoat and the musician-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave reunited after the triumph of “The Proposition” (2005) for this 1930s crime film with a phenomenal cast, including Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce and Mia Wasikowska. Cave’s story, adapted from the historical novel “The Wettest County in the World” by Matt Bondurant, concerns the bootlegging Bondurant brothers (Clarke, Hardy and LaBeouf), who find their business interests threatened by a crooked U.S. Marshal (Pearce) and a rival bootlegger (Oldman), among others. The period costumes and settings are stunning, and the sprawling cast meshes nicely; Hardy is especially strong as a man of few words but furious fists.Stream it here.‘A League of Their Own’ (Sept. 30)This 1992 smash, directed by Penny Marshall, is based on the true story of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed in 1943 to help keep the national pastime going while World War II pulled male ballplayers out of the majors. Geena Davis stars as Dottie Hinson, star catcher of the Rockford Peaches, and Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the former baseball star and current drunk who coaches the team when he’s sober (which is infrequent). With able support from Jon Lovitz, Madonna, Lori Petty, David Straitairn and many more, this one is smoothly assembled, sensitively acted and riotously funny.Stream it here.‘Nanny McPhee’ (Sept. 30)A decade after winning the Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” Emma Thompson returned to the typewriter to pen the film version of a slightly less venerated literary property: the “Nurse Matilda” children’s novels, by the British author Christianna Brand. But it doesn’t feel like slumming; Thompson invests her screenplay with all the winking wit you would expect, and she absolutely goes for broke in her performance of the title role, a kind of warts-and-all Mary Poppins. The director Kirk Jones orchestrates the chaos with a sure hand.Stream it here.‘Rocky I-V’ (Sept. 30)The first five films of the Rocky franchise — starring, written and sometimes directed by Sylvester Stallone — vary wildly in style, quality and critical and commercial reception. But taken together, they create a fascinating portrait of mainstream American moviemaking from the late 1970s to the early ’90s, as the modest, character-driven drama of the 1976 original slowly but surely gave way to the montage-heavy, jingoistic bombast of “Rocky IV” from 1987. But for better or worse, each film offers its own pleasures, from the specificity of Stallone’s dialogue to the richly played supporting characters (particularly Talia Shire’s Adrian and Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed) to the crowd-pleasing closing bouts.Stream “Rocky” here, “Rocky II” here, “Rocky III” here, “Rocky IV” here and “Rocky V” here.‘Star Trek’ / ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ (Sept. 30)When J.J. Abrams was announced as the director of a newly rebooted series of “Star Trek” films, he was still best known for his television work. The decision smacked of some desperation; after several “Star Trek” television spinoffs and numerous big-screen resurrections, what could anyone (let alone a not-yet-proven filmmaker) add to the mythos of the original “Enterprise” crew? But Abrams’s inaugural 2009 entry was an absolute treat, a sleek, well-cast popcorn picture that reinvigorated the original characters and story while also playing appropriate tribute. The 2013 follow-up, “Into Darkness,” is less successful but still an entertaining diversion, particularly for Benedict Cumberbatch’s take on Ricardo Montalbán’s villainous “Khan.”Stream “Star Trek” here and “Star Trek: Into Darkness” here.‘Titanic’ (Sept. 30)The 1912 sinking of the Titanic luxury cruise liner remains a source of fascination (and tragedy) in American culture, thanks in no small part to the long shadow cast by James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar winner and box office champion. It’s the kind of film that can be described only as “old fashioned”— not as a slam but simply as a statement of fact. Cameron so deftly mixes spectacle and special effects with poignant human interest (thanks primarily to the warmth and chemistry of its stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) that one is legitimately reminded of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” It’s a throwback epic, and its appeal has proved timeless.Stream it here.‘Warm Bodies’ (Sept. 30)We’ve seen no shortage of zombie horror in the 21st century, from “28 Days Later” — written by the aforementioned Garland — to the “Dawn of the Dead” remake to the (paradoxically) unkillable “Walking Dead” series and its many spinoffs. But we haven’t seen very many zombie rom-coms, which makes this 2013 charmer from the writer and director Jonathan Levine (“Long Shot”) all the more commendable. Adapting the novel by Isaac Marion, Levine tells the story of R (Nicholas Hoult, later of “The Great”), a zombie who falls hard for the still-living Julie (Teresa Palmer). Well, every relationship has its issues.Stream it here. More

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    Are We Finally Ready to Take Tammy Wynette Seriously?

    The unsung godmother of so-called “sad girl” music — and one of pop’s most wrenching chroniclers of feminized pain — has long been misunderstood.Earlier this month, at a concert in Arkansas, Lana Del Rey covered a song she’d never played live before: Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.”The performance made headlines, even if most of the accompanying articles held “Stand by Your Man” — an exhaustively debated cultural Rorschach test about badly behaved men and the women who put up with them — and Wynette herself at arm’s length.People magazine called the original song “polarizing.” The website Stereogum referred to Wynette’s track as “controversial.” Rolling Stone noted that Del Rey “didn’t introduce the song or offer commentary on her intentions,” as if simply paying tribute to Wynette couldn’t have been enough of an intention. That article referred to Wynette’s 1968 hit as “a tune many considered an affront to the feminist movement of the late ’60s,” then linked to the publication’s recently revised list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, on which “Stand by Your Man” ranked No. 473.It was just another Rorschach test: Even 25 years after her death, nobody knows quite what to make of Tammy Wynette.Born Virginia Wynette Pugh in 1942, Wynette had a resonantly sad voice and a life story to match. Married at 17; divorced with three children by 23; in and out of disappointing and sometimes abusive relationships (most famously with her frequent duet partner, George Jones); a sufferer of chronic health problems and bizarre, unexplained acts of violence; gone too soon when she died in her sleep in 1998, at age 55.She was also, perhaps because of these experiences, one of the most wrenching chroniclers of feminized pain that popular music has ever known.Wynette and George Jones onstage in 1980 in Chicago. The couple’s tumultuous relationship was chronicled in the recent series “George & Tammy.”Kirk West/Getty ImagesIn recent years, Dolly Parton has been canonized into an untouchable pop-cultural saint, and Loretta Lynn, rightly remembered as a feisty country pioneer when she died last year at 90, enjoyed a late-career renaissance collaborating with younger rock and alt-country artists. But Wynette’s legacy has become more complicated, perhaps because her tumultuous life and storied career have too often been conflated with the flattest and most literal reading of her signature song.Notoriously, when rumors of Bill Clinton’s infidelity surfaced during his 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton told a reporter, “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” But was that ever what Wynette was actually advocating? (For one thing, Wynette was also known for singing one of the most famous songs about divorce.) A recent prestige-TV series and an incisive new book of music criticism offer their own answers, and varied ways to think about Wynette in a modern context.Late last year, Showtime aired the long-gestating “George & Tammy,” in which Jessica Chastain gives a steely, fearless performance as Wynette. (Her work earned an Emmy nomination, and she’s currently the betting favorite to win.) With Michael Shannon playing a convincingly unhinged, charismatic and ultimately contrite Jones, the series encompasses the six years of the couple’s troubled marriage and decades of their closely entwined careers.Jessica Chastain as Wynette and Michael Shannon as Jones in “George & Tammy.”Dana Hawley/Showtime, via Associated PressAs strong as the lead performances are, the series suffers from small anachronisms and fictitious dramatizations — no, Wynette was not in the studio when Jones finally nailed the vocal take of his heartbreaking late-career weepie “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” at least not physically — and it too often scripts Wynette reciting retrofitted platitudes that overexplain the era’s obvious sexism. (“If a girl singer got drunk like you boys do, they would toss her out of Nashville so fast,” she says to Jones, who is eating a raw potato in an attempt to alleviate a hangover.) But “George & Tammy” is most obviously marred by its answer to the classic music biopic conundrum: to lip-sync (and risk looking unserious) or to sing (and inevitably fall short of the source material)?Chastain tackles the songs herself, and though her pipes are decent, her performances never quite transcend honky-tonk bar karaoke. Watching the series, you miss the specific and elusive magic of Wynette’s own voice, making clear how easy it is to take for granted. As with the many lackluster and overly literal covers of “Stand by Your Man” that have been recorded over the years, the power of Wynette’s vocals and the emotional intelligence of her interpretations are somehow easier to appreciate in absentia.And what a voice it was: emotionally weighty but swooping and nimble, downright kaleidoscopic in its melancholy. “The thing about Wynette’s voice,” writes the critic Steacy Easton in a slim but thoughtful new book, “Why Tammy Wynette Matters,” “is that, often, how it catches and breaks, even how it twangs, are marks of domestic melodrama in her performance.”In prose that occasionally veers toward the academic but mostly stays succinctly readable, Easton effectively makes the case that Wynette is underappreciated and worthy of a serious critical reappraisal. The musician has long had a few strikes working against her. As Clinton’s curt 1992 dismissal attests, the women Wynette sang about and embodied in her songs often seemed at odds with second-wave feminism. She often sang about the sorts of people and situations that aren’t usually championed in a culture that devalues women’s work and doesn’t treat their perspectives seriously. Easton notes, astutely, that Wynette’s songs often depicted “failures of the domestic,” and that “Wynette’s best work is about when the most private failures become public scandals.”That intuitive toggling between the private and the public gets at why Wynette’s is one of the saddest voices ever put to tape. Its sadness comes not from rawness or feral inhibition, but from the constant, self-conscious mediation between how the singer is feeling and how she must present herself to the world.It’s that brimming-but-never-spilling-over quality that so many women, mothers and queer people have learned to use as a survival strategy. (Easton, who is trans and nonbinary, provides a refreshing perspective on Wynette and gender: “The idea of putting on your womanhood has a tender resonance,” they write.) It’s knowing exactly how to fold a napkin to dab your mascara so no one knows you’ve been crying. Or, as Reba McEntire sings in an affecting 2019 ballad called “Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain,” it’s when “you don’t want him to see you crying, so you’re crying in the rain.” It’s also, in some cases, about the sacrifice of swallowing that pain to protect a child’s feelings — about spelling out “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” rather than explaining what it means.Despite her cultural association with standing by her man, Wynette actually divorced four times. In Ken Burns’s 2019 documentary “Country Music,” the singer-songwriter Jeannie Seely notes the irony that while Lynn’s songs often embodied the persona of the feisty woman ready to kick her man to the curb, she was the one who stood by her man for his entire life. Seely mused, of Wynette and Lynn, “I always kind of thought they wrote each other’s songs.”Wynette on her tour bus in 1971. Al Clayton/Getty ImagesOnstage in Arkansas, a state abutting Wynette’s own Mississippi birthplace, Del Rey put her into yet another modern context — perhaps one that made the most sense yet. I’ve often considered Wynette to be an unrecognized godmother of so-called “sad girl” music, that somewhat nebulous aesthetic that initially flourished on the microblogging website Tumblr, and of which Del Rey has become an unofficial icon. While there’s something explicitly womanly about Wynette’s sadness — “this ain’t no little girl heartache,” McEntire sings in her definition of “Tammy Wynette pain” — Del Rey’s cover brings Wynette’s music to a generation and a type of listener less inclined to dismiss the expression of feminine pain as weakness. As the critic and artist Audrey Wollen once said of her playfully defined “Sad Girl Theory,” “there is an entire lineage of women who consciously disrupted the status quo through enacting their own sorrow.” Which sounds like yet another way of talking about that Tammy Wynette kind of pain.That type of subversion pervades Wynette’s exquisite and deeply felt performance of “Stand by Your Man,” too — a performance that no one has come close to topping. The Chicks play it too perky; Lyle Lovett’s version is winkingly smarmy; Carla Bruni’s cover … well … exists. Del Rey, though, seems to understand something about the song’s tension and dynamism, its paradoxical earnest irony. But even an eerie A.I. recording speculating what it might sound like if “Del Rey” recorded a “studio version” of “Stand by Your Man” can’t quite fathom the song’s murky depths as well as Wynette could. Again, the voice you miss is distinctly hers.Maybe I am able to come to it with less baggage than I may have had I lived through the particular culture war it spawned in 1968, but I do not listen to this song — or, for that matter, Wynette’s devastating 1967 breakout hit “I Don’t Want to Play House” — and hear a ringing endorsement of heterosexual monogamy, female submission and male supremacy. I hear a quavering teardrop of a voice acknowledge and sing like she means it, “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” And then I hear her issuing one of the most zinging backhanded compliments in the history of patriarchy: “If you love him, oh be proud of him/’cause after all, he’s just a man.” More

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    Venice Film Festival: Adam Driver Calls Out Netflix and Amazon Amid Strikes

    His film “Ferrari,” a big-budget indie from Michael Mann, is the kind of adult drama the major studios have shied away from.The name placard on the dais said “A. Driver,” and if you’re making a Ferrari movie, you’d certainly better have one.This particular Driver happened to be in high demand at the Venice Film Festival, which bowed on Wednesday and has mostly had to make do without famous movie stars as the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike prohibits actors from promoting films made by most major studios. But since the new Michael Mann-directed film “Ferrari” will be released domestically by Neon and internationally by STX — two companies that aren’t members of the group that Hollywood guilds are striking against — its star, Adam Driver, was free to make the trip to Venice and add A-list appeal to a festival in dire need of it.“I’m proud to be here, to be a visual representation of a movie that’s not part of the A.M.P.T.P.,” Driver said on Thursday at the news conference for the film, referencing the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. He praised the interim agreement devised by SAG-AFTRA that allows stars to promote independent films as long as their distributors agree with the terms the actors’ guild is seeking.“Why is it that a smaller distribution company like Neon and STX International can meet the dream demands of what SAG is asking for — the dream version of SAG’s wish list — but a big company like Netflix and Amazon can’t?” asked Driver, who has previously promoted Netflix movies like “Marriage Story” and “White Noise” in Venice. “Every time people from SAG go and support movies that have agreed to these terms with the interim agreement, it just makes it more obvious that these people are willing to support the people they collaborate with, and the others are not.”After the crowd at the news conference applauded, Mann added, “No big studio wrote us a check. That’s why we’re here, standing in solidarity.”You wouldn’t think while watching it that “Ferrari” is an indie movie. With a reported budget of $95 million, this is the sort of lavish adult drama that Mann used to make for major studios all the time. But movies like “Heat,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Ali” and “The Insider,” all films Mann made in the 1990s or early 2000s, have fallen out of favor in our superhero-saturated era, and expensive prestige releases like this one have recently struggled to break out at the box office.Can the record-breaking success of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” reinvigorate the sort of big-budget dad drama that used to be a theatrical staple? “Ferrari” is counting on it, even if its fellow December releases, like “Wonka” and “The Color Purple,” don’t necessarily lend themselves to “Barbenheimer”-level portmanteaus. (“Wonkari” and “Ferple” just sound like off-brand Pokemon.)Like Nolan’s summer hit, “Ferrari” is about a midcentury visionary with a wandering eye: Driver’s Enzo Ferrari is a racer-turned-automaker who’s feuding with his wife (Penélope Cruz), hiding a mistress (Shailene Woodley) and trying to save his namesake company before it goes belly up. Mann tracks him during the summer of 1957, when it seemed like so many of Ferrari’s problems could be fixed by a single, momentous race. If one of his drivers can win the dangerous, thousand-mile race Mille Miglia, Ferrari reasons, it would stoke enough demand to lift the company’s fortunes. Still, his single-minded pursuit of that goal turns out to be a life-or-death matter with all sorts of unexpected casualties.It may be hard now to conceive of “Ferrari” as a Driver-less vehicle, but over the many years that Mann tried to mount it, the director flirted with leading men like Robert De Niro, Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, who went on to topline the Mann-produced “Ford v Ferrari” (2019). The 39-year-old Driver is called upon to play a man two decades older for most of the film’s running time, but that gray-haired intensity actually suits him: His Ferrari is hard-nosed and compelling, like a too-serious MSNBC commentator who slowly attracts an ardent, horny fan base.Regardless of whether “Ferrari” can chase the box-office success of “Oppenheimer,” Driver said it was a miracle it was made at all, summing up the film’s truncated production schedule and false starts in a way that his title character could understand.“It’s hard not to get philosophical about an engine — the amount of pieces that have to come together, similar to films, and work on the exact right timing in the exact right moment,” he said at the news conference. “And then there’s the element of human intuition and reflex. It’s a 50/50 marriage, and that’s very much filmmaking.”When all those different elements manage to coalesce on a premium race car — or a big-budget indie film — it’s beautiful, Driver said. “It also makes you aware of how many things could go wrong at any moment,” he noted. “It’s a special thing to be part of.” More

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    John Eliot Gardiner Withdraws From Performances After Accusations He Struck Singer

    John Eliot Gardiner said he would take time off until next year to “get the specialist help I recognize that I have needed for some time.”The renowned conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who drew criticism this month when he was accused of hitting a singer in the face after a performance in France, said on Thursday that he would withdraw from performances for the rest of the year as he sought counseling.“I am taking a step back in order to get the specialist help I recognize that I have needed for some time,” Gardiner said in a statement. “I want to apologize to colleagues who have felt badly treated and anyone who may feel let down by my decision to take time out to address my issues. I am heartbroken to have caused so much distress and I am determined to learn from my mistakes.”Intermusica, the agency that represents Gardiner, said he would withdraw from all concerts until next year to focus “on his mental health while engaging in a course of counseling.” He had at least 10 more planned engagements this year, including a planned six-concert tour in the United States and Canada in October with two of his ensembles, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists.“Over the next few months he will be undergoing an extensive, tailored course of treatment and he asks for space and privacy while the program is ongoing,” a spokesman for Intermusica, Nicholas Boyd-Vaughan, said in a statement.Gardiner, 80, apologized last week after he was accused of striking the singer, William Thomas, 28, after a performance of the first two acts of Berlioz’s opera “Les Troyens” with two of his ensembles, the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, at the Festival Berlioz in La Côte-Saint-André. Gardiner abruptly returned to London to see his doctor and withdrew from the rest of a planned European tour with the ensembles.Gardiner was upset that Thomas had headed the wrong way off the podium at the concert, according to a person who was granted anonymity to describe the incident because the person was not authorized to discuss it publicly.Gardiner expressed regret last week, saying that he had lost his temper and that he had apologized to Thomas, a rising bass from England.“I know that physical violence is never acceptable and that musicians should always feel safe,” he said at the time. “I ask for your patience and understanding as I take time to reflect on my actions.”Thomas was not seriously injured and has continued to perform on the tour. He has not commented on the encounter.Gardiner, who conducted at the coronation of King Charles III of Britain in May, is a crucial figure in the period-instrument movement and the founder of some of its most treasured ensembles. He has made numerous recordings, many of which are considered classics, and wrote 2013’s “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” about the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach.In October, he was to appear with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists in the United States, including at Carnegie Hall, where he was to lead Bach’s Mass in B Minor and a rare performance of Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.”The Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, a nonprofit that oversees Gardiner’s ensembles, said in a statement on Thursday that the tour would proceed without Gardiner, and that a replacement would be announced at a later date.“The well-being of all our performers and employees is important to us and we respect his decision,” the statement said. More

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    Overlooked No More: Chick Strand, Pioneering Experimental Filmmaker

    Often turning her lens on women, she emerged as one of independent cinema’s fiercest proponents on the West Coast.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In Chick Strand’s 1979 film “Soft Fiction,” five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories, including one who describes being molested by her grandfather. As she talks, images of her performing household activities like cooking breakfast appear in splintered frames and enigmatic shapes.“It is a film about women who win,” Strand explained in a 1998 interview with the conceptual artist Kate Haug for the journal Wide Angle. “It is not about women who were victims or who had survived.”“They carry on,” she added, and by doing so they become “more potent, more powerful, more of themselves.”In “Femme Experimentale,” a research paper based on her interviews with several pioneering female filmmakers, Haug wrote that Strand’s “experimental techniques” in that 55-minute film disrupted “the visual codes of documentary film” with its “poetic transitions between narrators.”“Soft Fiction,” which is regularly screened in university film programs, retrospectives and museums around the world, was one of dozens of movies made by Strand, an experimental filmmaker who often trained her lens on women. Among the others were “Anselmo and the Women” and “Fake Fruit Factory,” both from 1986.Strand was a late bloomer by the standards of her day: She didn’t make her first film until she was 34. But she would go on to have momentous impact on the West Coast’s experimental film movement.A still from Strand’s film “Fake Fruit Factory” (1986), about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.Canyon Cinema Foundation“She rejects the classification of ‘feminist artist,’” the film scholar Gene Youngblood told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1999, when some of Strand’s films were being shown at the College of Santa Fe. “And yet she has produced some of the most memorable portraits of female characters in the history of cinema.”Though she never achieved the same level of fame as contemporaries like Barbara Hammer and Shirley Clarke, scholars say her work was just as groundbreaking.Chick Strand was born Mildred Totman on Dec. 3, 1931, in Berkeley, Calif., to Russel and Eleanor Totman. Her father was a bank teller, her mother a homemaker. (Chick was a nickname given to her by her father).She first developed an interest in film while studying anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. By then she had already dabbled in photography.In the 1960s, inspired by the growing free speech movement, Strand began hosting makeshift screenings in her backyard with her first husband, Paul Anderson Strand, an artist, and the experimental film impresario Bruce Baillie. These “happenings,” as they called them, were intended to showcase highly personal, often esoteric audiovisual experiments among friends. As word spread, they quickly became carnivalesque productions, with Strand, Baillie and other regulars dressing in costumes and performing live while the films were shown to an increasingly large group of strangers.A still from Strand’s “Soft Fiction” (1979), in which five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories.Canyon Cinema FoundationIn 1961, she founded The Canyon Cinemanews, a journal for local filmmakers that Stanford University called “the main organ of the independent filmmaking community” when it purchased the journal’s archives in 2010. The journal offered what it described as “a cornucopia of announcements, letters, classifieds, how-to information, call-outs and more” for local filmmakers who lacked access to Hollywood.In 1966, the same year she began studying ethnography at the University of California, Los Angeles (and the same year her son, Eric, was born), Strand presented a three-minute short, “Angel Blue Sweet Wings,” at the New York Film Festival. The film captured the luminous, psychedelically colored landscape of Strand’s second home, in Mexico, through a roaming, almost dancing camera, with the faces of her friends collaged seamlessly over fuzzy bodies, plants and mountains. It was described as “an experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions” by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.In 1967, Strand helped start the Canyon Cinema collective with Baillie and the filmmakers Lawrence C. Jordan, Robert Nelson, Lenny Lipton and Ben Van Meter. The organization — part pop-up cinematheque, part artists’ cooperative — distributed experimental films by now-famous directors like Hammer, Clarke and Peggy Ahwesh. Canyon Cinema later became a full-time nonprofit, with many of its members’ works incorporated into the National Film Registry.By then Strand and her second husband, Neon Park, the artist known for his imaginative album covers, were splitting their time between California and Mexico. In Mexico, she began to explore assemblage and ethnography more formally in her art, resulting in several works now considered landmarks of West Coast cinema, including “Fake Fruit Factory,” about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.“I’d be tripping over the rocks and speaking this terrible Spanish,” Strand told L.A. Weekly in 2006. “But I was so incredibly interested, and people really responded.”Strand with her second husband, the artist Neon Park. They split their time between homes in California and Mexico.Canyon Cinema FoundationStrand then delved into what would become perhaps her best-known work: a 20-year trilogy of ethnographic films on the life of Anselmo Aguascalientes, a poor Mexican Indian tuba player. The first of these, “Anselmo” (1967), about his music, “represents an early example of Chick Strand’s abiding interest in documenting people, objects, animals and events through a heightened and poetic subjectivity, while at the same time using assemblage techniques that allow her to incorporate disparate, sometimes jarring elements,” Maria Pramaggiore, a professor of media studies at Maynooth University in Ireland, wrote in an essay, “Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography,” published in the book “Women’s Experimental Cinema” (2007).The techniques used in “Anselmo” — and later in “Cosas de Mi Vida” (1976), about Anselmo’s life, and “Anselmo and the Women,” about his wife and mistress — would, Pramaggiore noted, become hallmarks of Strand’s documentary practice.Another key work, “Kristallnacht” (1979), was more technical, using the whites and blacks of 16-millimeter film negatives to craft a luminous existential tribute to Anne Frank. In that film, reflections play across shots of women swimming in a pool of water, sparking glimmers in the chiaroscuro darkness of each inverted image.Throughout her filmmaking career, Strand taught at the film arts program at Occidental College in Los Angeles, ultimately becoming the program’s director. She retired in 1996 but continued to produce groundbreaking experiments in film in her twilight years. As she told L.A. Weekly a decade into retirement: “I’m very satisfied creating works of art. I can’t seem to keep my mind from doing this, from painting or planning new films. It’s just what I love to do.”Strand died of cancer on July 11, 2009, at 77. But she lived long enough to see 350 of her personal items permanently entered into the Motion Picture Academy’s Film Archive in 2007. More

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    Taylor Swift Eras Tour Concert Film Coming to Movie Theaters

    A theatrical version of the billion-dollar tour — a cultural juggernaut that just ended its North American leg — opens Oct. 13.Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the billion-dollar juggernaut that has dominated the cultural calendar this year, may be on a break before picking up internationally, but its momentum will only rest so long: The show is coming to movie theaters this fall.“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” concert film will be released in the United States, Canada and Mexico on Oct. 13, Swift announced on social media Thursday, with U.S. AMC Theaters promising at least four showtimes per day from Thursday to Sunday upon opening.“The Eras Tour has been the most meaningful, electric experience of my life so far and I’m overjoyed to tell you that it’ll be coming to the big screen soon,” Swift said. “Eras attire, friendship bracelets, singing and dancing encouraged.”Anticipating the white-hot demand that has followed the tour since its announcement, crashing ticketing systems around the world, AMC promised in a news release that it had “bolstered its ticket server capacity to handle traffic at more than 5 times the current record for the most ever tickets sold in an hour.” (The company added, however, that it was “also aware that no ticketing system in history seems to have been able to accommodate the soaring demand from Taylor Swift fans when tickets are first placed on sale.”)Tickets are on sale now. Prices start at $19.89 for adults and $13.13 for children, substantially less than what fans paid for the tour itself — especially on the robust secondary market — as the concert industry adjusts to sometimes prohibitively high costs for its biggest events.Swift, 33, wrapped this year’s North American dates with four shows in Mexico last week. Her downtime, though, will be brief. In addition to the movie version of the concert, the singer will release “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the fourth of rerecorded original albums, two weeks later, on Oct. 27. By November, the Eras Tour will pick up in Argentina before traveling around the world in 2024, with dates — including nine additional U.S. shows — continuing into November 2024.“1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the new edition of her 2014 pop blockbuster, marks Swift’s seventh release in barely three years, a period of artistic productivity that has fueled pent-up, post-pandemic demand for the singer’s live show. Jon Caramanica, a critic for The New York Times, said in a review of the first concert in March that the Eras Tour put on display “how many pivots Swift has undertaken in her career, and how the accompanying risks can have wildly different consequences.”The trade publication Pollstar has estimated that the singer sold about $14 million in tickets for each show so far. By the end of next year, the 146 stadium dates could reach $1.4 billion or more in sales. More