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    Yogi Berra on the Field: The Case for Baseball Greatness

    A new documentary argues that the Yankee catcher was not just a malaprop-prone, beloved celebrity but also a legend of the game.In the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, there’s a sports figure who towers over the competition.Among the nine sayings attributed to one Lawrence Peter Berra, the New York Yankees catcher better known as Yogi, are phrases that may seem nonsensical at first, but on further reflection offer wisdom for the ages.“You can observe a lot by watching.”“It was déjà vu all over again.”And of course, there’s “It ain’t over till it’s over,” which provides the title for a new documentary about Yogi’s life.“It Ain’t Over” aims to be a corrective to the caricature implanted in the cultural consciousness of Yogi as an amiable clown, a malaprop-prone catcher who looked as if he were put together with spare parts. But Yogi was not only a cuddly pitchman for insurance, beer and chocolate milk, an inspiration for a certain cartoon bear, and a stand-up guy beloved by teammates; he was, the film argues, one of the best baseball players who ever lived.“This guy was criminally overlooked his whole life, at every stage,” said Sean Mullin, the film’s director.The documentary, which opens Friday, is intensely personal, tapping the eldest of Yogi’s 11 grandchildren to serve as a narrator with no pretense to objectivity in fighting for her grandfather’s legacy.It was a relatively recent slight that encapsulates the film’s defining thesis and yields the opening scene. During the All-Star Game in 2015, Major League Baseball honored the four players voted by fans as the greatest living legends. Watching that night with her grandfather, Lindsay Berra remembers becoming infuriated that Yogi had not made the cut. The director Sean Mullin and Lindsay Berra, Yogi’s granddaughter, say the Yankee’s prowess has been “criminally overlooked.” Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesMullin and Lindsay Berra, in separate interviews, emphasized that they meant no offense to the four greats honored that night — Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax and Johnny Bench. They just fervently believe that Yogi should have been the fifth man walking on the field that night in Cincinnati.“I always thought from the beginning that I figuratively wanted to put Grandpa back in the picture with the documentary,” said Lindsay Berra, who is an executive producer on the film.The filmmakers marshal the statistics and an impressive array of former players and other baseball experts to back up their claim. Yogi — who died in 2015 at 90 — was a core part of 10 World Series championship teams as a player, more than anyone else. He won three Most Valuable Player awards, played in All-Star games in 15 straight years and in 1956 caught the only perfect game in World Series history. And only two major leaguers have ever hit more than 350 home runs while striking out fewer than 450 times: Joe DiMaggio and Yogi.The statistic that most impresses Lindsay Berra comes from 1950. That season, Yogi went to the plate 656 times and struck out just 12 times: “That to me will always be astonishing, because guys today strike out 12 times in a weekend.”Yogi Berra leaping into the arms of pitcher Don Larsen after the only perfect game in a World Series, in 1956.Associated PressAll this passionate lobbying is not mere special familial pleading. Jon Pessah, who wrote the 2020 biography “Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask” (and is not in the film), said the idea that Yogi’s baseball prowess has been overlooked “is 100 percent true.”Besides the hitting feats, Yogi willed himself into becoming a terrific defensive catcher and was expert at guiding his temperamental pitchers. (During Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, he did not shake off one of the 97 pitches Yogi called.)“After studying his career, you say, wow, this guy carried the Yankees in the ’50s,” a decade that bridged DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Pessah said. “You look at what he meant on the field and at the plate, he was a force.”The unfair, and incomplete, perception of Yogi has much to do with his stubby stature and comparisons with his famous teammates. DiMaggio was slick and polished, and married to Marilyn Monroe; Mantle was the blue-eyed, golden-haired, all-American boy from Oklahoma. Yogi — well, no demeaning or belittling description seemed off-limits to the writers who covered him. Early in his career, a Life magazine article referred to him as “knock-kneed” and “barrel-shaped,” and likened his running style to that of “a fat girl in a tight skirt.” That was all in one sentence.His first manager called him an ape. In newspaper and magazine articles, Yogi’s looks were compared to those of a gargoyle, a gorilla and an orangutan.“Can you imagine reporters writing today that someone looked like a gorilla and was too ugly to be a Yankee?” Lindsay Berra said. But Yogi ultimately didn’t mind playing the butt of jokes, sloughing them off as just another test of character. “I think he knew inside who he was,” Mullin said. “There was a real confidence at a very base level.”Growing up the fourth child of Italian immigrants in St. Louis, Yogi quit school after eighth grade to help support his family, although he pretty much just wanted to play baseball. Constantly underestimated, he ultimately signed with the Yankees. He was drafted during World War II and was in a rocket boat at Omaha Beach on D-Day.Back from the war, he played on a Yankees farm team for a year before being called up late in the 1946 season. He was in the majors for good.As seen in the documentary, from left: Larry, Tim and Dale Berra, sons of the Yankee great. Dale said it was stern words from his father that helped him kick a cocaine addiction.Daniel Vecchione/Sony Picture ClassicsWhile proving naysayers wrong with his hitting prowess and improving defense, he also displayed deep-seated integrity. At a time when racism still thrived in Major League Baseball despite Jackie Robinson integrating the game in 1947, Yogi showed respect to Robinson and other Black players; he later became very good friends with Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League.But a charmed life — he also had a storybook marriage to his hometown sweetheart, Carmen — does not make for the most dramatic of films.To add some texture to his portrait, Mullin examined both Yogi’s larger cultural significance and his personal pain.Yogi became one of the first celebrity endorsers, hawking the chocolate milk drink Yoo Hoo, Doodle fish oil, Camel cigarettes and, really leaning into the persona later in life, Miller Lite and Aflac insurance. “He never resented the way he was viewed but he was savvy enough to know it made business sense,” Pessah said.Yogi’s son Dale followed him into the majors, but a promising career was derailed by a cocaine addiction. Rehab didn’t help, and neither did encouragement from his family. It took an ultimatum, delivered by Yogi, at an intervention in 1992.“You’re not going to be my son anymore unless you make a decision to not do drugs again,” Dale Berra said his father told him. He has been clean since.The other deep wound in Yogi’s life came in 1985, inflicted by the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Serving as manager for Steinbrenner was a decidedly unsafe proposition, and 16 games into Yogi’s second season, he was fired. What angered Yogi most wasn’t the firing, it was that Steinbrenner didn’t have the guts (or decency) to deliver the blow himself. Yogi, always a man of his word, vowed never to return to Yankee Stadium until Steinbrenner apologized.It took nearly 14 years before a rapprochement was brokered, leading to Yogi Berra Day at the stadium in July 1999. Forty-three years after the World Series perfect game, Don Larsen was reunited with his former battery mate to throw out the ceremonial first pitch.Yogi didn’t have a glove with him, so he borrowed one from Joe Girardi, a Yankees catcher at the time. Those there that day still marvel at what they then witnessed. David Cone proceeded to pitch another perfect game for the Yankees. A life well lived had its magical coda. More

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    Hollywood Writers Strike Is ‘Going to Be a While’

    The writers and entertainment companies remain far apart on several key issues, including money, and the standoff could last for months.It’s not just posturing: As screenwriters continue their strike against Hollywood companies, the two sides remain a galaxy apart, portending a potentially long and destructive standoff.“Any hope that this would be fast has faded,” said Tara Kole, a founding partner of JSSK, an entertainment law firm that counts Emma Stone, Adam McKay and Halle Berry as clients. “I hate to say it, but it’s going to be a while.”The Writers Guild of America, which represents 11,500 screenwriters, went on strike on Tuesday after contract negotiations with studios, streaming services and networks failed. By the end of the week, as companies punched back at union in the news media, and striking writers celebrated the disruption of shows filming from finished scripts, Doug Creutz, an analyst at TD Cowen, told clients that a “protracted affair seems likely.” He defined protracted as more than three months — perhaps long enough to affect the Emmy Awards, scheduled for Sept. 18, and delay the fall TV season.The W.G.A. has vowed to stay on strike for as long as it takes. “The week has shown, I think, just how committed and fervent writers’ feelings are about all of this,” Chris Keyser, a chair of the W.G.A. negotiating committee, said in an interview on Friday. “They’re going to stay out until something changes because they can’t afford not to.”The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, streaming services and networks, has maintained that it hopes “to reach a deal that is mutually beneficial to writers and the health and longevity of the industry.” Privately, however, member companies say they are prepared to weather a strike of at least 100 days. The most recent writers strike, which began in 2007 and ended in 2008, lasted that long.“It’s fair to say there’s a pretty big gap,” Bob Bakish, chief executive of Paramount Global, told analysts and investors on a conference call on Thursday. Paramount and its CBS subsidiary are prepared to “manage through this strike,” he added, “even if it’s for an extended duration.”Among the writers’ demands is that studios not let artificial intelligence encroach on writers’ credit or compensation.James Estrin/The New York TimesBoth sides have insisted that the other needs to make the first move to restart talks. None are scheduled. For the moment, media companies have turned to contract renewal negotiations with the Directors Guild of America, which start on Wednesday. That contract expires on June 30.Like writers, directors want more money, especially regarding residual payments (a type of royalty) from streaming services, which have rapidly expanded overseas. Before streaming, writers and directors (and other creative contributors, including actors) could receive residual payments whenever a show was licensed, whether that was for syndication, an international deal or DVD sales. In the streaming era, as global services like Netflix and Amazon have been reluctant to license their series, those distribution arms have been cut off.In addition to raises, however, writers want media companies — Netflix, in particular — to make structural changes to the way they do business. The companies — Netflix, in particular — say that is a bridge too far.The W.G.A. has proposals for mandatory staffing and employment guarantees, for instance. The union contends that the proposals are necessary because entertainment companies are increasingly relying on what is known in Hollywood slang as a miniroom. In one example of a miniroom, studios hire a small group of writers to develop a series and write several scripts over two or three months. Because they have not officially ordered the series, studios pay writers less than if they were in a large, traditional writers’ room.And given the relatively short duration of the position, those writers are then left scrambling to find another job if the show is not picked up. If a show does get a green light, fewer writers are sometimes hired because blueprints and several scripts have already been created.“While the W.G.A. has argued” that mandatory staffing and duration of employment “is necessary to preserve the writers’ room, it is in reality a hiring quota that is incompatible with the creative nature of our industry,” the studio alliance said in a statement on Thursday.Writers responded with indignation. “We don’t need the companies protecting us from our own creativity,” said Mr. Keyser, whose writing credits include “Party of Five” and “The Last Tycoon.” “What we need is protection from them essentially eliminating the job of the writer.”Writers also want companies to agree to guarantee that artificial intelligence will not encroach on writers’ credits and compensation. Such guarantees are a nonstarter, the studio alliance has said, instead suggesting an annual meeting on advances in the technology. “A.I. raises hard, important creative and legal questions for everyone,” the studios said on Thursday. “It’s something that requires a lot more discussion, which we have committed to doing.”Mr. Keyser’s response: Go pound sand.“This is exactly what they offered us with the internet in 2007 — let’s chat about it every year, until it progresses so far that there’s nothing we can do about it,” he said. In that case, have fun on the picket lines, studio executives have said privately: It’s going to be hot out there in July.Over the last week, media companies conveyed an air of business as usual. On Thursday, HBO hosted a red carpet premiere for a documentary, while the Fox broadcast network announced a survivalist reality show called “Stars on Mars” hosted by William Shatner.“3 … 2 … 1 … LIFT OFF!” the network’s promotional materials read.With the exception of late-night shows, which immediately went dark, Mr. Bakish assured Wall Street, “consumers really won’t notice anything for a while.” Networks and streaming services have a large amount of banked content. Reality shows, news programs and some scripted series made by overseas companies are unaffected by the strike. Most movies scheduled for release this year are well past the writing stage.Shares climbed on Friday for every company involved with the failed contract talks; investors tend to like it when costs go down, which is what happens when production slows, as during a strike. If the strike drags into July, analysts pointed out, studios can exit pricey deals with writers under “force majeure” clauses of contracts.“The sorry news for writers is that, in declaring a strike, they may in fact be helping the streaming giants and their parent companies,” Luke Landis, a media and internet analyst at SBV MoffettNathanson, wrote in a report on Wednesday.Writers, however, succeeded in making things difficult for studios over the first week. Apple TV+ was forced to postpone the premiere of “Still,” about Michael J. Fox and his struggle with Parkinson’s disease, because Mr. Fox refused to cross a picket line. In Los Angeles, writers picketed the Apple TV+ set for “Loot,” starring Maya Rudolph, causing taping to halt. In New York, similar actions disrupted production for shows like “Billions,” the Showtime drama. Other affected shows included “Stranger Things” on Netflix, “Hacks” on HBO Max and the MTV Movie & TV Awards telecast on Sunday, which went forward without a host after Drew Barrymore pulled out, citing the strike.“The corporations have gotten too greedy,” Sasha Stewart, a writer for the Netflix documentary series, “Amend: The Fight for America” as well as “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore,” said from a picket line last week. “They want to break us. We have to show them we will not be broken.”Writers went into the strike energized. But a rally at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Wednesday seemed to supercharge the group, in part because leaders from other entertainment unions turned out to support them — and in fiery fashion. During the 2007 strike, writers were largely left to stand alone, while a union representing camera operators, set electricians, makeup artists and other crafts workers blasted the writers for causing “devastation.”Ellen Stutzman, chief negotiator for the writers, received a standing ovation from the estimated 1,800 people who attended the rally. During the session, writers suggested expanding picket lines to the homes of studio chief executives and starting a public campaign to get people to cancel their streaming subscriptions.Some writers realized that Teamsters locals, which represent the many drivers that studios rely on to transport materials (and people), would not cross picket lines. So they started to picket before dawn to intercept them. (The W.G.A. has advised a 9 a.m. starting time.) At least one show, the Apple TV+ dystopian workplace drama “Severance,” was forced to shut down production on Friday as a result of Teamsters drivers’ refusing to cross. More

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    Book Review: ‘The Making of Another Modern Motion Picture Masterpiece,’ by Tom Hanks

    Whimsically chronicling the creation of a Marvel-style movie, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” sags under a deluge of detail.THE MAKING OF ANOTHER MAJOR MOTION PICTURE MASTERPIECE, by Tom Hanks. Illustrated by R. Sikoryak.Sidelined by the pandemic, some actors fired up ceramics or sang fragments of “Imagine.” Tom Hanks, one of the most prominent to contract an early case of Covid, bounced back by making a run at the Great American Novel. Alas, it is more Forrest Gump trotting from coast to coast than Sully landing on the Hudson.Titled “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” the book arrives at a crossroads for Hollywood. The Writers Guild of America went on strike this past week, seeking pay increases in an age of streaming and protections from that thundering Godzilla, artificial intelligence. The consequent halt of film and TV production deprives not only audiences, but also the vast number of workers required to get stories onscreen: extras, editors, costume and lighting designers, makeup artists, caterers, drivers, gofers, key grips.“Masterpiece” is a loving homage to those workers, a true insiderly ensemble piece in the vein of “The Player” (written by Michael Tolkin in 1988, directed by Robert Altman in 1992), or Quentin Tarantino’s eventually self-novelized “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”Minus the murder and gore, of course — this is Tom Hanks.The novel also acknowledges a fading time when leading actors, even avatars of Everyman decency like the author, were royalty: their work shown not in living rooms but red-velvet-swagged “palaces.”It’s framed by one of the outlying courtiers of the industry: a fictional former freelance journalist and reviewer named Joe Shaw. Now teaching creative writing at a minor Montana college, he has been granted access to the set of “Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall” — a movie based on a comic from a Marvel-like company — along with the Gay Talese-like superpower of narrative omniscience. He recedes after a foreword, like John Ray Jr. from “Lolita.”“Masterpiece” then pans very slowly — with lots of emphatic italics, arch ellipses and a few footnotes — over the full arc of the fake movie’s development. So we begin with the back story of the comic’s writer, Robby Andersen (pen-name TREV-VORR), who had been inspired by an uncle, Bob Falls, a Marine in World War II, and follow a very long yellow brick road through the seemingly triumphant release of “Knightshade” at a fancifully imagined 1,114-seat theater, the Grand Cinema Center in Times Square, where “a fellow in a tuxedo” plays “New York, New York” on a house organ.Charm abounds — again, this is Tom Hanks — but “Masterpiece” is too often a maddeningly excursive endeavor that made me think, more than once, of a Richard Scarry book without the drawings. Alternate titles: “Hollywood: Busy, Busy Town” or “What Do Movie People Do All Day?” (Actually, it does have drawings, by R. Sikoryak: an old-timey comic the boy Robby reads at the corner drugstore, then another he created while working at Kool Katz Komix as TREV-VORR, and then a movie tie-in for “Knightshade,” all fine places to rest one’s detail-wearied eyes.)The novel’s multitude of characters includes Bill Johnson, the writer-director of “Knightshade” (a film more “Iron Man” than “Avengers”); an obnoxious leading man named O.K. Bailey (OKB for short), who’s cast as Firefall; and Wren Lane, who wins the part of Eve Knight, the alter ego of Knightshade, a heroine who like many modern women has trouble sleeping.“Sure, she wants to make her bed with a decent chap when the time is right, but the time is never right!” Lane tells Johnson’s assistant, Allicia Mac-Teer, anachronistically (Hanksishly). “Nor is the chap.”Advised to go by “Al” because of sexism, the assistant gets hired after mastering a time management system at community college, “L.I.S.T.eN.,” short for “Let It Settle, Then eNact,” and using it to order Johnson his favorite frozen yogurt. (Pomodoro technique, move over.) Then there is Ynez Gonzalez-Cruz, driver for a Lyft competitor, PONY, whose ingratiation into the “Knightshade” base camp will eventually get her an office of her own and, after years of struggling in the gig economy, a salary that’s “a joke of abundance.”Moviemaking, Hanks would remind us, can be a rising tide, not in the depressing new climate change way, but the old optimistic American lift-all-boats way.He also conveys successfully that this “Business of Show” in the “City of Angles,” as Johnson nicknames it, is thoroughly exhausting, a realm where everyone is Wren Lane, waiting for the golden hour shot, showing up to get fake blood applied at 2 a.m. The word “coffee” appears, by my count, on 85 pages: triple espressos from a Di Orso Negro machine with frothed half-and-half for Mac-Teer; HaKiDo with oat milk for OKB; Pirate drip for a Teamster named Ace Acevido. Highly specific smoothies are fetched; catering tables are lovingly inventoried.“The offerings are both substantial, healthy snacks and stuff that is horrible for you but so very, very much appreciated,” our omniscient narrator shares. Sometimes “Masterpiece” reads like the thank-you speech Hanks, consummate nice guy, would give if granted unlimited time at the Oscars. You might admire its rah-rah spirit, yet still want to press fast-forward.A note on the type: Hanks has spoken and written extensively before, including in The New York Times, about his obsession with typewriters. A different antique model was featured in each of the 17 stories contained in his last book, a collection called “Uncommon Type.” Encountering a vintage Smith-Corona Sterling, Johnson’s chosen instrument, on Page 96 of “Masterpiece,” I rolled my eyes tolerantly.After turning 50 pages more and finding a minor character selling “Royals, Underwoods, Remingtons, Hermes, Olivettis, all in working order,”as if in an Etsy shop, I had to fight a strong urge to close the book, fire up a triple espresso and see if anything was happening in the tiny palace of my iPhone.THE MAKING OF ANOTHER MAJOR MOTION PICTURE MASTERPIECE | By Tom Hanks | Illustrated by R. Sikoryak | 499 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $32.50 More

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    Menahem Pressler, Pianist Who Co-Founded the Beaux Arts Trio, Dies at 99

    Mr. Pressler, who fled Nazi Germany as a youth, was the anchor of a group that, with various lineups, performed all over the world for 53 years.Menahem Pressler, the celebrated pianist who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and, after establishing himself in postwar America, co-founded the Beaux Arts Trio, which became the world’s reigning piano-violin-cello ensemble and dazzled audiences for a half-century, died on Saturday in London. He was 99. His death was announced by the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he had been on the faculty since 1955.At 14, Mr. Pressler hid on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, as Nazi thugs smashed his father’s shop. When World War II began in Europe, his Jewish family landed in Haifa, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. Traumatized, he nearly perished at 16, but he found the will to live in a haunting Beethoven sonata. In 1946, he won an international piano competition in San Francisco. A year later, he made his Carnegie Hall debut.After years as soloists, Mr. Pressler, the violinist Daniel Guilet and the cellist Bernard Greenhouse joined forces in 1955 and formed the Beaux Arts. Such groups, called piano trios although two of their members play string instruments, had been around for centuries. But theirs was a daring venture at a time when most listeners preferred string quartets, with their even sonorities and vast repertory, for intimate chamber concerts.There are technique and temperament issues in a piano trio. The elephantine grand piano can easily bully its smaller partners or timidly overcompensate. And the piano’s staccato notes have to blend with a smoother continuity of strings. Some trios are also notorious for two-against-one squabbles. But the Beaux Arts achieved what critics called a wondrous harmonic unity in a resilient three-way musical marriage.The final version of the Beaux Arts Trio in performance in New York in 2008, from left: Daniel Hope, Mr. Pressler and Antonio Meneses.Julien Jourdes for The New York Times“We do everything together, the good things and the bad,” Mr. Pressler told The New York Times in 1981. “We travel and get lost together. We eat meals together. As in every close relationship, the musical traits and qualities that first attracted us to one another can become irritants, so we have to keep renewing the attractions that first brought us together. We try to handle our separate egos and create a single ego for the whole group.”Over decades, the trio’s violinists and cellists came and went — changes that might have doomed the precarious balance of sound, interpretation and chemistry that is the heart of chamber music. But critics said the trio was held together by the diminutive, cherubic, irrepressibly ebullient Mr. Pressler, who as mentor and leader preserved its technical quality and its confluence of musical views.The Beaux Arts eventually won a devoted global following and many awards. It recorded nearly all the piano trio repertory — Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Saint-Saëns and others — mostly on the Philips label, through the boom years of LPs and into the digital age. The group was praised for redefining the perception of the piano trio and of chamber music itself.“In recent years, we’ve seen a rapid expansion not only of the audience for chamber music, but of that audience’s sophistication and its awareness that the genre also includes sonatas, piano trios, small vocal ensembles, quintets, sextets and indeed all manner of combinations,” John Rockwell of The Times wrote in 1979. “And for that expansion of awareness, we can partly thank the Beaux Arts Trio.”In 2008, when the Beaux Arts Trio disbanded after 53 years, Mr. Pressler was still its anchor, the last surviving original member. He was 84, but he continued performing as a soloist and with ensembles. He also continued teaching at Indiana University, where he held the Charles H. Webb chair in Music.Menahem Pressler was born in Magdeburg, Germany, on Dec. 16, 1923, 153 years after what is generally accepted as Beethoven’s birthday. One of three children of Moshe and Judith (Zavderer) Pressler, he began playing the piano at 6 and was an accomplished performer as a teenager, taught secretly by a church organist after Hitler’s persecution of the Jews rose to a fever pitch.He recalled Kristallnacht, in November 1938, when the Nazis orchestrated a nationwide attack on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues.“The thugs broke into our family shop in Magdeburg — a gentleman’s outfitters,” Mr. Pressler told The Guardian in 2008. His English still accented with the German of his childhood, he slipped into the present tense as vivid memories returned: “We are hiding in the house, hoping it will go by. In the street, you hear running, yelling, smashing sounds, banging at the door.”Menahem, his parents and his siblings, Leo and Selma, escaped to Italy months later and then reached Haifa. His grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all perished in the Holocaust.Tormented by loss and dislocation and unable to eat, he grew thin and weak. One day, playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 31, he fainted. But it was a turning point.“It has idealism,” he said of the sonata. “It has hedonism, it has regret, it has something that builds like a fugue. And at the very end, something that is very rare in Beethoven’s last sonatas — it is triumphant. It says, ‘Yes, my life is worth living.’”He recovered, and at 16 he performed with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.After winning a Debussy competition in 1946, Mr. Pressler moved to New York. His Carnegie Hall debut, at which he performed Schumann’s Piano Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, won rave reviews.“This, indeed, was the playing of a free artist, secure in his birthright,” Olin Downes wrote in The Times. “The presence of a huge orchestra, an authoritative conductor, an immense audience, did not and could not inhibit the warmth, the loveliness and certainty of his interpretation.”In 1949, he married Sara Scherchen. She died in 2014. His survivors include their son, Amittai; their daughter, Edna Pressler; and his partner since 2016, Annabelle Weidenfeld. Mr. Pressler had homes in London and Bloomington, Ind.In 1955, the same year Mr. Pressler began teaching at Indiana University, the Beaux Arts Trio made its debut at the Berkshire Music Festival in Lenox, Mass. (now the Tanglewood Music Festival).Touring was often a bizarre experience. Mr. Pressler played pianos that were out of tune, battered or broken. One piano’s pedals once fell off. In a town in Chile, he was presented with an upright. In another hall, the piano had a dead key, and a message: “I tried to fix that note but I couldn’t. Try not to use it too much.” Some page turners could not read music. The trio was stranded in India. Mr. Greenhouse did an entire European tour with his leg in a cast.But to perceptive audiences, the trio was a marvel, not only of sound but also of subtle sights. Its performers were in constant visual and aural communication with one another — heads swiveling and nodding, eyes making contact, bows signaling cues, the pianist’s left-hand upbeat cuing the cello’s entrance or the violin’s stroke: an undercurrent of almost imperceptible signs as the tidal melody swelled and ebbed.While the trio’s artistry was achieved over many years, it was tested periodically by the adaptations required to incorporate new members. After 32 years as the cellist, Mr. Greenhouse was succeeded by Peter Wiley (1987-98) and Antonio Meneses (1998-2008). Mr. Guilet was replaced by Isidore Cohen (1968-92), Ida Kavafian (1992-98) Young Uck Kim (1998-2002) and Daniel Hope (2002-8).The Beaux Arts often performed as many as 130 concerts a year in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas, including annual appearances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Library of Congress.“Menahem Pressler: Artistry in Piano Teaching,” by William Brown, was published in 2008. That year, Mr. Pressler returned to Germany to observe the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. And in 2013, at 90, he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, at a New Year’s Eve concert that was televised live throughout the world. More

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    Don Sebesky, Arranger Who Helped Broaden Jazz’s Audience, Dies at 85

    He won Tonys for his orchestrations and Grammys for his compositions and arrangements. But he was best known for his genre-straddling work at CTI Records.Don Sebesky, who in a wide-ranging musical career played with leading big bands, was a behind-the-scenes force at CTI Records and other jazz labels, won Grammy Awards for his own compositions and arrangements, and orchestrated some 20 Broadway shows, died on April 29 at a nursing home in Maplewood, N.J. He was 85.The cause was complications of dementia, his daughter Elizabeth Jonas said.Mr. Sebesky’s musical interests ranged far and wide. He created arrangements not only for jazz musicians but also for a diverse range of pop vocalists, including Nancy Wilson, Roberta Flack, Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow. To jazz aficionados, though, he was best known — and sometimes criticized — for the work he did as a sort of house arranger for Creed Taylor Inc., better known as CTI, a jazz label that was a major force in the 1970s.From the beginning, Mr. Taylor and CTI were on a mission to broaden the audience for jazz by exploring intersections with pop, rock and R&B, and by making music that was more accessible to mainstream audiences than some of jazz’s more esoteric strains. It was an approach that displeased some purists, but it sold records, and Mr. Sebesky’s arranging skills were pivotal to that success.Mr. Sebesky arranged the saxophonist Paul Desmond’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970), an album of interpretations of Simon & Garfunkel songs. He arranged the guitarist George Benson’s “White Rabbit” (1972), an album anchored by Mr. Benson’s rendition of the title track, the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane hit. Pairing Mr. Benson with that song was an idea Mr. Sebesky had proposed to Mr. Taylor, but with a twist.“I suggested we do ‘White Rabbit’ in a Spanish mode,” Mr. Sebesky told Marc Myers for the website JazzWax in 2010. “He agreed. George Benson doesn’t read music. He just heard the song and automatically fell into the groove.”Mr. Sebesky in the studio with the pianist Herbie Hancock and the guitarist Wes Montgomery in 1967, working on Mr. Montgomery’s album “A Day in the Life.” The album would be one of the most successful Mr. Sebesky arranged.Chuck StewartThose were just two of the countless records on which Mr. Sebesky worked for CTI from the late 1960s (when it was a subsidiary of A&M) through the 1970s. He also made his own albums as a bandleader, for CTI and other labels. These, too, often merged jazz and rock.His debut album, “The Distant Galaxy” (1968), included versions of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna.” “Don Sebesky and the Jazz-Rock Syndrome,” released the same year, included his version of the Peter, Paul and Mary hit “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” as well as other covers.In 1984 Mr. Sebesky made his nightclub debut as a bandleader, bringing a 12-piece band to Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan to play selections from “Full Cycle,” an album he had just released on the Crescendo label that featured his arrangements of Miles Davis’s “All Blues,” John Lewis’s “Django” and other jazz standards.“At Fat Tuesday’s, a low-ceilinged, narrow room in which the 12 musicians must be strung out in a line, instrumental separation and clarity are a far cry from the possibilities of a recording studio,” John S. Wilson wrote in a review in The New York Times. “But what may be lost in this respect is made up for in the vitality and involvement projected by the musicians and the visual razzle-dazzle of the variety of instruments brought into play.”The next year, reviewing a return engagement at the same club, Mr. Wilson wrote, “This is a band full of fresh ideas and fresh sounds that set it apart.”By then, Mr. Sebesky had begun working on Broadway as well. His first credit was for some of the orchestrations for “Peg,” a 1983 autobiographical one-woman show starring the singer Peggy Lee.That show was short-lived, but many of his other Broadway shows did better. The 1999 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” ran for more than two years and won him a Tony Award for best orchestrations. “An American in Paris” in 2015 also had a long run, and he shared a second Tony, with Christopher Austin and Bill Elliott, for the orchestrations of that show.His one attempt at writing the score for a Broadway show was less successful. “Prince of Central Park,” for which he wrote the music and Gloria Nissenson wrote the lyrics, closed after four performances in 1989.In 1999 Mr. Sebesky, after many nominations, won his first Grammy Award, for his arrangement of the pianist Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debby” on his album “I Remember Bill: A Tribute to Bill Evans.”The next year was a career highlight: He became one of the few people who could say that he didn’t lose a Grammy to Carlos Santana.Mr. Santana, thanks to his album “Supernatural,” was a Grammy juggernaut that year, winning eight awards. In the category of best instrumental composition, Mr. Sebesky won for “Joyful Noise Suite” — beating out, among others, Mr. Santana.“That was very much of a surprise,” Mr. Sebesky, who also won a Grammy that year for best instrumental arrangement, told The Home News Tribune of New Jersey in 2000. “We expected the Santana steamroller to run over everything.”Mr. Sebesky played accordion on the guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli’s 1998 album of Beatles songs. “My mother,” he once said, “thought I’d be the best accordion virtuoso in the Western Hemisphere.” But he had other plans.via Sebesky familyDonald Alexander Sebesky was born on Dec. 10, 1937, in Perth Amboy, N.J. His father, Alexander, was a laborer in a steel cable factory, and his mother, Eleanor (Ehnot) Sebesky, was a homemaker.He studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music but left before graduating in the late 1950s to pursue a nascent career as a trombonist, playing in the bands of Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson.Before studying with the big-band trombonist Warren Covington, his instrument had been the accordion.“My mother was real disappointed” when he switched instruments, he told The Evening Press of Binghamton, N.Y., in 1982. “She thought I’d be the best accordion virtuoso in the Western Hemisphere.”By the early 1960s, Mr. Sebesky was concentrating on writing and arranging.“There seemed like nothing could be better than taking a group of instruments and seeing what sounds could be made to come out of them,” he told The Evening Press.Mr. Sebesky’s first marriage, to Janet Sebesky, ended in divorce. He married Janina Serden in 1986. In addition to Ms. Jonas, his daughter from his second marriage, he is survived by his wife; another daughter from his second marriage, Olivia Sebesky; two sons from his first marriage, Ken and Kevin; a brother, Gerald; and nine grandchildren. Two daughters from his first marriage, Cymbaline Rossman and Alison Bealey, died before Mr. Sebesky. Before moving to the nursing home in Maplewood, he lived for about 30 years in Mendham, N.J.Jamie Lawrence, an Emmy Award-winning musician and music director who worked with Mr. Sebesky on various projects, including playing synthesizer on demos for commercials Mr. Sebesky worked on, recalled that Mr. Sebesky’s charts could be hard to read — a result, he thought, of his working quickly because he always had so many jobs going on.“But if you could decipher them and get all the notes down,” he said in a phone interview, “they all made sense. They were the right notes. He was a musician’s musician.”Alex Traub More

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    Diane Keaton Likes a Messy Comedy

    The Oscar-winning actress and one of the stars of “Book Club: The Next Chapter” makes friends when making movies and is trying to get to the beach.One of Diane Keaton’s new favorite pastimes is going for walks by herself, taking pictures of abandoned storefronts.“You can see sadness, but you can also look at the attempts that they made when they were selling whatever they were selling,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “One place will look like one thing, and another, you could tell that it had clothes or some sort of fashion with it. It’s fascinating for me.”Keaton’s solitude is broken up by acting, which creates opportunities for her to make friends and meet new people, including on her latest movie, “Book Club: The Next Chapter.”Out Friday, it is a sequel to the 2018 film “Book Club,” and reunites Keaton and her friends, played by Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen. This time they are coming out of quarantine for a trip to Italy, and the movie is peppered with references to “The Alchemist,” Paulo Coelho’s best-selling novel about a young shepherd in search for treasure and his “personal legend.”“The movie’s fine,” Keaton said. “I did what I could, you know, sort of.”The 77-year-old Oscar-winning actress talked about Goodwill fashion, Miley Cyrus and tortillas. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Visual BooksI have a whole room full of visual books. They’re engaging in a way that moves me. Somebody recently sent me this amazing book of Lee Friedlander’s photographs, “Lee Friedlander Framed by Joel Coen.” It just takes me back to how the world looked — our world, our country, our cities and people’s homes.2FashionMy interest in fashion goes back to my mother. When I was in junior college, or even younger, and I was consumed by what people were wearing, there were other girls who had more money, and they were able to have clothes that I envied. My mom and I would go around to the Goodwill and we would buy old clothes — an old skirt, a blouse — and she would make it into a better version of that.3The BeachMy father loved the ocean. He would gather us together constantly to explore all kinds of places that have oceanfront. For almost a year, I’ve been trying to buy a beach house. It’s not like it’d be a grand beach house, but everybody’s holding on to their homes. If you go to Laguna Beach, which I love, you can’t buy anything.4FamilyI had this dinner with my children last night, and we were all together, and my daughter’s husband was there. It’s just wonderful that I have that opportunity. Even as a young adult, I really needed my mother and my father a lot. When I had problems, they were there, both of them. I loved them. They were very much an active part of my life.5Miley Cyrus and AsheThese are two really interesting young women who are taking over music, who I have been lucky to encounter and to get to know a little bit. I like both of these two young women because they’re both unique.6My Golden RetrieverI have a golden retriever named Reggie. Somebody gave her to me as a gift. Reggie’s been a bad girl today. I’m so happy that I have enough room out in the backyard for her to just destroy all the plants. Right, Reg? I love that dog. There are things that just take your heart and your breath away.7TortillasI like tortillas. I buy tortillas. Just the tortillas. I slap a bunch of stuff inside of it and I eat it and love it. I love tortillas.8ComediesI do feel more comfortable with comedy than drama. I like the mess of it and that it can kind of crop up on you and then you’re free to play around.9Movie TheatersIt’s been a while since I’ve been to the theater, but I love to go to movie theaters, and it’s been really interesting the way it’s just kind of fallen apart, but now it’s very slowly coming back. I love that. I’m glad it’s coming back.10My Collage WallI have a massive wall of images that I’ve cut out of magazines or that I’ve kept. Right now I’m looking at a picture I cut out of a magazine of Buster Keaton. It’s so great. What a beautiful face. One is of a truck that has a huge sign that these men are trying to hold onto that says, in large letters, “Damaged.” Go figure. More

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    When Connie Converse, the ‘Female Bob Dylan,’ Lived in N.Y.C.

    There’s a resurgence of interest in the pioneering singer-songwriter who disappeared when she was 50.Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s become known as the singer-songwriter era, making music in the predawn of a movement that had its roots in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.But her songs, created a decade earlier, arrived just a moment too soon. They didn’t catch on. And by the time the sun had come up in the form of a young Bob Dylan, she was already gone. Not simply retired. She had vanished from New York City, as she eventually would from the world, along with her music and legacy.It wasn’t until 2004, when an N.Y.U. graduate student heard a 1954 bootleg recording of Ms. Converse on WNYC, that her music started to get any of the attention and respect that had evaded her some 50 years before.The student, Dan Dzula, and his friend, David Herman, were spellbound by what they heard. They dug up more archival recordings, and assembled the 2009 album, “How Sad, How Lovely,” a compilation of songs that sound as though they could have been written today. It has been streamed over 16 million times on Spotify.Young musicians like Angel Olsen and Greta Kline now cite Ms. Converse as an influence, and musical acts from Big Thief to Laurie Anderson to the opera singer Julia Bullock have covered her songs.“She was the female Bob Dylan,” Ellen Stekert, a singer, folk music scholar and song collector told me during my research for a book about Ms. Converse. “She was even better than him, as a lyricist and composer, but she didn’t have his showbiz savvy, and she wasn’t interested in writing protest songs.”Seventy-five years ago, Ms. Converse was just another young artist trying to make ends meet in the city, singing at dinner parties and private salons, and passing a hat for her performances.She knew that her songs did not jibe with the saccharine pop of the day. “This type of thing always curdles me like a dentist’s appointment,” she wrote to her brother before an audition at Frank Loesser’s music publishing company, where she predicted what executives would say of her songs: “lovely, but not commercial.”In January 1961, the same month that Dylan arrived from the Midwest, Ms. Converse left New York for Ann Arbor, Mich., where she reinvented herself as an editor, a scholar and an activist.In 1974, a week after her 50th birthday, she disappeared and was never seen again.Ms. Converse lived in New York from 1945 to 1960, and though she was intensely private, she kept a diary, scrapbooks and voluminous correspondence that were left behind after she drove away for good, offering clues about what the Manhattan chapter of her life was like. Here are some of the neighborhoods, venues and sites around the city that provided the musician with a backdrop for her short but trailblazing stint as a songwriter.The 1940s: Bohemians of the Upper West SideRiverside ParkIn 1944, after dropping out of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Ms. Converse moved to New York. Her first job was at the American Institute of Pacific Relations, where she edited and wrote articles about international affairs. “I am struck by the breadth of the topics she covered,” said the contemporary international relations scholar Michael R. Anderson, who calls her writing and reporting “remarkable.”She lived on the Upper West Side. The image of her in Riverside Park, above, was found in an old filing cabinet that belonged to the photographer’s widow. It is one of the first known images of Ms. Converse in New York.The Lincoln ArcadeMs. Converse, left, plays for friends at the Lincoln Arcade.Lois AimeSome of Ms. Converse’s closest friends lived and hung around the bohemian enclave known as the Lincoln Arcade, a building on Broadway between West 65th and 66th Street. With a reputation as a haven for struggling artists, it had been home to the painters Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and George Bellows, the last of whom had lived there with the playwright Eugene O’Neill.The group was a hard-drinking lot, given to holding court late at night. One surviving member of that crew, Edwin Bock, told me that Ms. Converse would often be clattering away at a typewriter, at a remove from the rest, though sometimes she did things he found shocking, like climbing out the front window well past midnight to stand on a ledge, several stories above the street.The 1950s: Making Music in the Village and Beyond23 Grove StreetPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her studio apartment at 23 Grove Street, where she wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse lost her job when the institute landed in the cross hairs of the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee. Sometime late in 1950, she moved to the West Village and began a new phase of her life as an aspiring composer and performer.She bought a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder and began making demos of herself singing new songs as she wrote them. It was here, while living alone in a studio apartment at 23 Grove Street that Ms. Converse wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog (including everything on “How Sad, How Lovely”).The Village at that time “was the Left Bank of Manhattan,” the writer Gay Talese told me, and it had “whiffs of the future in it” in terms of its permissiveness about lifestyle choices. Nicholas Pileggi, a writer and producer, suggested that given her address, Ms. Converse, a loner, would have had no problem hanging out by herself at Chumley’s, a former speakeasy.The upstart book publisher Grove Press was also just down the block, and she was close to The Nut Club at Sheridan Square, where jazz musicians often played, as well as the more respectable Village Vanguard.Grand CentralPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her first and only appearance on live television: The Morning Show, with Walter Cronkite. There is no recording of the live performance. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCHer first and only television appearance was in 1954, on the “The Morning Show” on CBS (hosted that year by Walter Cronkite), though how Ms. Converse secured the appearance and what she played and talked about may never be known (shows at this time were broadcast live; no archival footage exists). Because the program was staged in a studio above the main concourse at Grand Central and shown live on a big screen in the hall, everyone bustling through the station that morning could have looked up and caught the young musician’s one and only brush with success.Ms. Converse was extremely close to her younger brother, Phil. When he visited her in the city for the first time, Ms. Converse described the reunion in her irregularly kept diary, noting that the two “met like strangers at Grand Central, and fell to reminiscing over oysters.”Hamilton HeightsMs. Converse took a photograph of the street below her W. 138th St. apartment in 1958.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCIn 1955, Ms. Converse took up residence at 605 West 138th Street, in Harlem, a block away from Strivers’ Row. There, she shared a three-bedroom flat with her older brother, Paul, his wife, Hyla, and their infant child, P. Bruce, a situation she called “a cost-saving measure.” The new apartment had an upright piano, which Ms. Converse used to compose an opera (now since lost), a series of settings for poems by writers like Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a song cycle based on the myth of Cassandra who, according to Greek mythology, was given the gift of prophesy and then cursed to be never understood.Circle in the SquareThe 1956 production of “The Iceman Cometh,” which Ms. Converse attended. Sam Falk/The New York TimesAn avid theatergoer, Ms. Converse attended Jose Quintero’s 1956 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” which made Jason Robards a star and effectively launched the Off-Broadway movement. “Did I mention that I saw an in-the-round production of ‘The Iceman Cometh’ last month?” she wrote to Phil and his wife, Jean, that October. “Some four and a half hours of uncut O’Neill, but only the last 15 minutes found me squirming in my seat.”The Blue AngelAt this erstwhile nightclub on East 55th Street, unique at the time for being desegregated, Ms. Converse met the cabaret singer Annette Warren, who expressed interest in covering Ms. Converse’s songs, and who would make at least two of them, “The Playboy of The Western World” and “The Witch and the Wizard,” staples of her show for decades to come.1960: The Lost Tape; Goodbye, New YorkNational Recording StudiosNational Recording Studios, at 730 Fifth Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets, had been open for only a year when Ms. Converse showed up in February 1960 to record an album. It was a solo session that, because she did just one or two takes of each tune, only took a few hours. The recording was a rumor until 2014, when Phil Converse unearthed a reel of it in his basement. An adman who was a fan of Ms. Converse’s music had procured the recording session for her for free. That album, the only one she made, remains unreleased.Upper West SideMs. Converse in her apartment on West 88th Street, her last known residence in New York. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse closed the circle of her peripatetic Manhattan existence by moving back to where she’d started: the Upper West Side. This time, she lived in a brownstone on West 88th Street, a half block from Central Park. This was her last known New York address; by 1961, she was gone.Her music, mostly made in isolation or at small gatherings, was nearly lost but for the efforts of her brother Phil, who archived what he could; David Garland, who played her music on WNYC in 2004 and 2009; and Dan Dzula and David Herman, the students who, decades later, introduced her work to a new generation.“The first time I played a Connie Converse song for a friend, she sat silently and cried,” Mr. Dzula said. “From that moment I knew Connie’s magic would reach at least a few more people in a deeply personal and special way.”He added: “Could I have envisioned her blowing up like this when we first put out the record? Absolutely not. But also, yeah, kind of!”Howard Fishman is the author of the new book “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

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    Lewis Capaldi Will Break Your Heart. (But Don’t Take Him Too Seriously.)

    The joke-cracking Scottish musician’s melodramatic ballad “Someone You Loved” is a blockbuster. Figuring out his next moves became more complicated than he’d anticipated.The first thing you have to know about Lewis Capaldi is that he is kidding. The Scottish musician, who specializes in pop treacle, is foulmouthed the way a young child is — cheekily and cuddly, without a fleck of harm. He is anti-piety, a bloke on a punchline bender. Almost everything he says is accompanied by a wink.One Wednesday afternoon last month, Capaldi jumped out of a chauffeured SUV in Times Square, joined by his manager and a handful of associates. Up on a billboard — which one wasn’t immediately clear — was an ad for a documentary Capaldi had released on Netflix that day, and he was there to film some shocked-and-awed promotional content for social media.The first time the ad rotated in, Capaldi tried a couple of photos pointing up at himself — eh, not so funny. By the third time, after several interruptions from fans surprised to see the global superstar out and about, he’d figured out a mischievous plan.He hit record. “People over here are having orgasms left, right and center,” he shouted into his phone’s camera, while clips from the film played behind him. He gave the phone a serious, shocked look, then added, “Whenever they see my face.”He seemed pleased. The next day, he posted the video to his Instagram story, quickly followed by footage of someone wheat-pasting posters over his own ads. “My 15 minutes of fame are over,” he deadpanned.Those minutes, though — they have been very, very intense. In late 2018, Capaldi released “Someone You Loved,” a startlingly crisp and uncommonly beautiful jolt of nuclear-grade mush. It is lightly schlocky in the 1980s way — ultra-saccharine, hyper-melodramatic — a diminishing resource in the contemporary pop landscape. It has become the fourth most streamed song in Spotify history, with 2.76 billion streams.Just before his Times Square outing, Capaldi, 26, was nursing a Sprite at an outdoor table at the classic New York City dive bar the Ear Inn, musing over the weight of such a massive hit.“Such an anomaly,” he said. “I hate saying this because it makes me feel noxious almost. It’s becoming quite an evergreen song. I still hear it as much as I did when I first put it out.” For those who feel that they have been oppressed by the song, he understands: “You get to a point where people might just be like, We don’t want to hear you whine again about something. Can you do something that’s a bit less?”He was wearing a ruddy brown vintage Carhartt jacket, a black Nike sweatshirt, dark pants and Vans — simple and unglamorous. Around a dozen times over two hours on a block with almost no foot traffic, he was politely interrupted by fans — at one point, a car screeched over to the curb so the driver could hop out to tell Capaldi he’d seen him perform in Philadelphia the previous night. (“He jumped out his car, just like I told him to,” Capaldi joked.)“It’s fine if that’s my song forever, and I kind of expect that to be” — at this moment, he was interrupted by a young girl, maybe 6 or 7 years old, and her mother, asking for an autograph.“What name should I put on it?” he asked. “Just your name,” the girl replied, and Capaldi guffawed.Capaldi’s nominally less scarred second album, “Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent,” will be released this month. Not every track on the album is a laser-targeted assault on the emotional stability of the listener, but the best ones are. Whether he’ll be able to unmoor his adoring public to the same degree he did the last go-round remains to be seen.Either way, Capaldi remains sanguine. “I went into releasing ‘Someone You Loved’ going, ‘This probably isn’t going to do that well.’ I’m going into this going, ‘This probably isn’t going to do as well as “Someone You Loved”’ — that’s a very big jump,” he said.“You get to a point where people might just be like, We don’t want to hear you whine again about something. Can you do something that’s a bit less?”Lyndon French for The New York TimesCapaldi has a scorched cannon of a voice, and it’s best deployed on songs about anguish. To date, his career has lurched forward one vocal bloodletting at a time. His debut single, “Bruises,” in 2017, was viral for that era. His debut album, “Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent,” was released in 2019 and featured “Someone You Loved” — which topped the Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for a song of the year Grammy — and also “Before You Go,” another howling and deeply moving catalog of despair.While all of this was happening, on the internet and in the media, he was a relentless jester — hilariously self-deprecating on Instagram and, later, TikTok. (“In the U.K. it’s like, This [expletive] guy again,” Capaldi said of his musical success there, whereas in the United States, “There are people here who just know the TikTok.”)Capaldi has had umpteen small moments in which his comedic persona has been as loud as his songs. At the Grammys in 2020, he had an Andy Kaufmanesque face-off on the red carpet with an unsuspecting Ryan Seacrest.“I was throwing a baseball at a brick wall, so there was no recoil,” Capaldi said of the appealingly peculiar interaction, adding that he’d been enjoying the fruits of Grammy weekend partying. “It was like, oh, this is so bizarre. But then in my head I’m like, this is even funnier.”All the while, his health was precarious. Last year, he announced that he’d been given a diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome — for Capaldi, it manifests in physical tics that arrive at random and can be made worse by stress. Sometimes, they happen when he’s onstage — at one recent concert, the crowd finished the songs that he couldn’t. But the tics subside when he’s at ease: When fans came up to him outside the Ear Inn to chat, they all but disappeared.“This sounds gross, but it’s become part of like a marketing strategy,” he said. “Every piece of content or thing I see with my name next to it is closely followed by Tourette’s. Which is mental, ’cause then I’m like, Billie Eilish has Tourette’s, and she doesn’t bang on about it like I do.”He continued, “It feels dirty. It feels odd.” Then he added with a laugh, “Whatever sells the records!”Capaldi’s diagnosis and the management of his illness is a major theme of his new documentary, “Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now,” which was originally intended to capture him wrestling with how to navigate a musical answer to one of the biggest songs in recent years, but ended up also documenting a much darker and more worrisome stretch of events.The cameras hover over Capaldi at his most awkward — false starts in the songwriting room (“My insecurity was so sky high”), cold sores on his lips, his manager fretting about whether any of the songs he has recorded are a worthy follow-up to “Someone You Loved,” his parents critiquing his songs. And also the tics that have been a feature of his life since childhood, which he now understands are attributable to his Tourette’s. He talks about going on the medication sertraline, which gives him diarrhea and erectile dysfunction.“There’s so much on the line,” Capaldi said of following up his hit. “I totally get why people are nervous and jumpy.”Lyndon French for The New York TimesThe film ends on a lightly triumphant comeback note, but the original ending was more somber. Capaldi said watching it was disorienting: “I was like, ‘Do I die? Is this posthumous?’”The day after Capaldi’s Times Square adventure, he was performing at Radio City Music Hall. Backstage a few hours before the show, in between playing putt-putt and eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, he remarked that he was planning to take omeprazole pills before his upcoming appearance on the spicy wings challenge talk show “Hot Ones,” a booking that fulfilled what he called in a 2018 tweet “ma life long dream.”In this country, he is both very, very popular and, somehow, a bit of a cipher. Onstage at Radio City, he joked about how much smaller the room was than the shows he’d recently played in Europe. “Every minute I’m up here I’m losing money,” he said. “It’s really not worth it.” (The show was still his biggest American concert to date, a quirk of blowing up just before the pandemic.)Near the end of the set he played “Wish You the Best,” a song that is the logical inheritor of “Someone You Loved” — cataclysmically depressing, but somehow triumphant and engineered for universal acclamation. The video is primally gut-wrenching, if you’ll allow for it; on TikTok, Capaldi has been cheerfully reposting fans’ clips of themselves weeping uncontrollably at its ending.But he chose not to release it as the first single from the new album, because he wanted a bit of freedom from the success he’d earned for himself. “I mean, I would love to work with, like, the Thom Yorkes of this world, but unfortunately, I don’t think he’d answer the call,” Capaldi said. Lately he’s been listening to the Mount Eerie album “A Crow Looked at Me,” an anti-pop grief purge that arrives at the same affect as Capaldi’s music with absolutely none of the bombast.“There are ballads on the album for sure, and I think maybe the easy thing to do would’ve been to put them out first,” he said. “It’s not necessarily that I was trying not to be put in a box. I just felt it weird to come back straight in: Here’s a ballad. Again.”In the documentary, you see Capaldi and his manager grappling with the follow-up pressure. In the SUV heading to Times Square, Capaldi needled his manager for having a “major label mind-set.”He understands, though. “There’s so much on the line,” Capaldi explained. “I totally get why people are nervous and jumpy.”Capaldi closes the album with “How I’m Feeling Now,” an acoustic confession of his insecurities. “It’s like ‘The Elephant Man’ — ‘I am a human being!’” he said, emphasizing that he’s more than just a ballad automaton. “I wanted to suck the air out a little bit.”At Radio City, though, there was little sign that Capaldi was unhappy with his lot. “New York!” he shouted. “It feels so good to be inside of you!” At the merch stand, he was selling country-and-western-style T-shirts that read “America’s Sweetheart Returns: Stealing Hearts in Every State.” The Jonas Brothers joined him onstage for a song, and Capaldi shouted to the crowd about how … aroused he was.Before “Before You Go,” about the death of his aunt by suicide, he solemnly proclaimed, “I want to thank you, Pat, ’cause it made me a lot of money.” And during “Lost on You,” he playfully chided the crowd for singing along too enthusiastically — “The song’s not finished, shut the [expletive] up.”He paused, then gave the crowd a rascally grin: “It sounds much better when I sing it.” Everyone cheered. 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