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      Ticketmaster Pauses Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Sale in France

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      Fans trying to purchase tickets to six of the pop superstar’s concerts faced long queues and technical issues before the company said that a new on-sale time would be announced.Ticketmaster has once again cracked under the weight of a Taylor Swift ticket sale — this time in France.As French fans prepared on Tuesday to purchase tickets to six concerts in May and June 2024 on Swift’s Eras Tour — four shows in Paris, two in Lyon — Ticketmaster’s website displayed a gigantic queue of customers ready to buy; one screenshot appeared to tell a fan that 1,023,504 shoppers were in line ahead of them.Soon, Ticketmaster announced that sales for those shows had been placed on “pause.” The company said that a new on-sale time would be announced, and that “all codes not already used will remain valid.” But some fans’ social media posts seemed to show technical errors on Ticketmaster’s website, including a progress icon that “keeps spinning and spinning and spinning,” as one fan — speaking English with an American accent, but with 762 euros’ worth of tickets in their shopping cart — put it.A few hours later, the French branch of Ticketmaster offered some more detail on social media, blaming the problem on a “third-party provider” that the company did not identify, and adding that tickets were still available. A representative of Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s corporate parent, said that the provider works with Ticketmaster only in France.The situation in France appeared to be a frustrating repeat of the problems that plagued Swift’s North American presale in November, when an influx of millions of fans — and bots — overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s systems, and fans reported issues like tickets in their shopping carts disappearing before they could be purchased. Ticketmaster shut down its public sale as a result, though the company also said it had sold more than two million tickets to the tour in a single day.Problems like those at Swift’s presale in November — as well as long-simmering concerns over Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s market dominance — led to a brutal Senate Judiciary hearing in January. Senators from both parties flatly called the company a monopoly and were skeptical of an executive’s explanation that Ticketmaster was unable to defend itself against an onslaught of bots during Swift’s presale.“This is unbelievable,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said at the hearing. “Why is it,” she added, “that you have not developed an algorithm to sort out what is a bot and what is a consumer?”Yet the demand for Swift tickets has been extraordinary, with Swift selling out stadiums everywhere she plays and tickets going for thousands of dollars on the secondary market. She is scheduled to complete the North American leg of her tour next month, then play in Latin America, Asia and Europe.The Justice Department has separately been conducting an antitrust investigation of Live Nation. The Justice Department has not confirmed that investigation, but Live Nation’s chief executive, Michael Rapino, has spoken about it openly. More

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      Lil Uzi Vert and Olivia Rodrigo Oust Morgan Wallen From No. 1

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      After weeks of dominance on Billboard’s album and singles charts, the country superstar was bested by the rapper’s LP “Pink Tape” and the singer-songwriter’s track “Vampire.”Olivia Rodrigo and the rapper Lil Uzi Vert have shaken up the Billboard charts after weeks of dominance by the country superstar Morgan Wallen, with Rodrigo taking the top single and Lil Uzi Vert the top album.Rodrigo’s “Vampire,” the first new single in two years from the 20-year-old singer, songwriter and actress who was catapulted to music stardom in early 2021 with “Drivers License,” opens at No. 1 on the Hot 100 chart. It had nearly 36 million streams and 26 million “airplay audience impressions,” a measurement of a song’s popularity on the radio, according to data from the tracking service Luminate.Rodrigo’s arrival bumps Wallen’s song “Last Night” to No. 2, after a total of 13 weeks at No. 1, the last 10 of them consecutive. “Vampire” is the first release from Rodrigo’s second studio album, “Guts,” due in September.On the album chart, Lil Uzi Vert scores the first rap No. 1 of the year with “Pink Tape,” a sprawling 26-track release filled with bits of rock and metal. “Pink Tape,” which Lil Uzi Vert — a 27-year-old from Philadelphia who emerged as part of the “SoundCloud rap” generation in the mid-2010s — has teased for more than two years, had the equivalent of 167,000 sales in the United States, including 210 million streams and 11,000 copies sold as a complete package.“One Thing at a Time,” Wallen’s latest album, falls to No. 2 in its 18th week of release. It has been No. 1 a total of 15 times, including the last three weeks. “Dangerous: The Double Album,” Wallen’s last LP, from 2021, is No. 5.Peso Pluma, a songwriter and performer from Mexico, holds at No. 3 for a second week with “Génesis,” the highest position ever for an album of regional Mexican music.Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” is No. 4, and Swift is favored to take over next week’s chart with her latest rerecorded album, “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version),” which was released on Friday and instantly became a major hit on streaming services. More

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      Madonna Officially Postpones Celebration Tour

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      The pop superstar’s global outing spotlighting her decades of hits will begin in October in Europe. “My focus now is my health,” she wrote on social media.Madonna’s North American tour is officially postponed.Two weeks ago, the pop star’s new Celebration Tour — a greatest-hits outing announced to great media fanfare in January, which was set to open this week — was put on an undefined “pause” after the singer’s manager said she had been admitted to a hospital with “a serious bacterial infection.” Rampant concern and speculation ensued among fans and within the music business about Madonna’s well-being, as well as the fate of her world tour, which had the potential to be one of the year’s biggest events.On Monday, a message from Madonna on social media clarified that the entire North American leg of her tour — 41 shows, about half the total that had been announced for the full world outing — would be rescheduled, and that the tour would now open in Europe in October. Live Nation, which is producing the tour, asked fans to “hold onto their tickets as they will be valid for the new dates once announced.”“My focus now is my health and getting stronger and I assure you, I’ll be back with you as soon as I can!” Madonna, 64, wrote in her first statement since her manager’s post on June 28. She also posted a photo that appeared to show her in her home in Manhattan.“I’m on the road to recovery and incredibly grateful for all the blessings in my life,” she added.Ticket sales for Madonna’s tour opened with a splash; according to an announcement in March, more than 40 dates had already sold out by then. But a glance at further dates on Ticketmaster’s website shows a number of locations — Sacramento; Tulsa, Okla.; even Barclays Center in Brooklyn — where plenty of seats are available.Last week, Beyoncé canceled a date in Pittsburgh, and postponed two others, over what was announced as issues with “production logistics and scheduling.”Rescheduling a major tour, for any reason, can be a complex and expensive process these days, music executives say. That is because with the return of live music after its shutdown by the Covid-19 pandemic, large venues typically lock in their schedules many months in advance, with little wiggle room for changes. In its announcement about the Madonna tour, Live Nation said simply, “Rescheduled dates will be announced as soon as possible.” More

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      Review: Ted Hearne’s ‘Farming’ Is a Sweet, Sad American Elegy

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      “Farming,” a choral work that had its New York premiere at Caramoor, is a chaotically ambitious reflection on colonization, consumption and marketing.Google search results broke my heart this weekend.Which was strange, because they didn’t include anything overtly emotional. They were lines like: “Yes, we are open. Call our consultants today.” And: “Reliable, seasonal work force.” The kind of thing you get when you look up “H-2A visa program,” which grants temporary admission to the United States for agricultural workers.But set to soulful, almost retro, doo-wop-honeyed music by Ted Hearne in “Farming,” these bland fragments seemed to touch the very core of our country: its rapacious economy, its broken immigration system, its corroded politics.Performed at Caramoor in Westchester on Sunday by the 24 vocalists of the Crossing, the precise and luminous new-music choir led by Donald Nally, it was the sweetest, saddest song.A suggestive, chaotically ambitious, often poignant reflection on colonization, consumption, marketing, entrepreneurship — you name it! — “Farming” reaches well beyond that Google search. Its quilt-like libretto encompasses 17th-century letters by William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and 21st-century musings by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, as well as absurdist out-of-context bits from UberEats’s Twitter feed and the Farmer’s Fridge customer loyalty program. (“Green are the Farmer’s Fridge reward currency,” the singers intone with maniacal severity.)As he has in superb works like “The Source” (based on the Afghanistan war logs leaked by Chelsea Manning) and “Sound From the Bench” (which set excerpts from Supreme Court proceedings), Hearne takes these found-text nuggets and gives them music that moves from lushly meditative to frenetic and obsessively repetitive — a visceral translation into sound of the information overload that is contemporary life.The singing is sometimes pure and sometimes processed into exaggeratedly AutoTuned “Alvin and the Chipmunks” automation. On guitars, keyboards, percussion and electronics, the six instrumentalists also veer from moody industrial rock and elegiac synth drones to jittery, hypersaccharine pop. (Occasionally resting, as in “Search,” that Google section, somewhere in between.)Not quite an hour long, the nine-part “Farming” is Hearne’s latest collaboration with the Philadelphia-based Crossing, which premiered it a few weeks ago in Bucks County, Pa., and already toured it to the Netherlands before this performance at Caramoor, its first in New York. The threat of rain on Sunday forced a move inside and an adaptation of the staging and complex sound design.“Farming,” with a patchwork text that includes the words of William Penn and Jeff Bezos, was sung by the 24 vocalists of the Crossing.James Estrin/The New York TimesGiven the circumstances, the production and the sound were impressively polished. A QR code included with the program linked listeners’ phones to the libretto; accessing it also involved signing onto Caramoor’s Wi-Fi, and it seemed that many in the audience weren’t doing it.Without following the words, it would be nearly impossible to have any idea what was going on in this non-narrative but intensely text-focused work. I’m no fan of wasting paper, but this was an appropriate occasion to print out the libretto for everyone — and future iterations might want to experiment with supertitles.And Ashley Tata’s perkily surreal corporate-parody staging, which put the performers in bright orange, magenta and white uniform-type costumes, felt like a complexity too many in a piece already full of them. The attempt to tie together the work’s many thematic strands by enacting onstage what Hearne’s program note called “a new corporation, powered by quasi-religious fervor,” was confusing — though maybe things were clearer in the original, outdoor conception.While this piece is less scattered than Hearne’s most recent major work, “Place,” a deeply personal reflection on gentrification, “Farming,” too, feels like a grab bag into which there’s always assumed to be room for yet one more idea. The central pairing of Penn and Bezos, the two pioneers — their vast differences, their essential similarities — would probably have been a more than sufficient subject here.The Penn quotations conjure some of the fundamental, irreconcilable tension of our country’s founding: his efforts to maintain good relations with the Indigenous population, on the one hand, and the commercial interests he wanted to expand, on the other.To what extent are Bezos’s manipulative doublespeak and high-minded invocations of empowerment through selling a break with Penn’s colonial promises? To what degree are they merely a continuation of what were sour lies to begin with?These are the kind of huge, unanswerable questions that Hearne’s works have presented so enigmatically yet powerfully over the past decade, fired by his passionate, resourceful music. I found other parts here — the Farmer’s Fridge, the Twitter fragments, the staging — a distraction from that burning central point.Yet I would have hated to lose “Search.” And Hearne’s earnest too-muchness, his eagerness to stuff as much as possible into each piece, has become such a central feature of his artistry that it’s hard to think of it as a weakness. It’s who he is.‘Farming’Performed on Sunday at Caramoor. More

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      At the Aix Festival, Premieres in Pursuit of Happiness

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      Two works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, by two inventive opera partnerships, use fables to explore grief and queer utopian dreams.Happiness doesn’t come quickly. Aristotle claimed that as one swallow does not make spring, neither does one good day make someone happy. That would take a lifetime, at least.Those measures — days, lifetimes, even generations — are put to the test in the pursuit of happiness in two new, fablelike works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France: George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s “Picture a Day Like This,” and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.”Yet in either case, time doesn’t guarantee anyone’s success in reaching that elusive goal.In “Picture” — Benjamin and Crimp’s fourth opera, a taut one-act of masterly craft — the aim is to find the embodiment of happiness. The protagonist, a woman whose infant son has died, is told that if she cuts a button from the sleeve of a happy person’s shirt, her child will be brought back to life. She has until nightfall, and is equipped only with a sheet of paper listing whom to seek.Crimp’s text, characteristically mysterious and strange, both untethered from reality and peppered with the banality of daily life, is something of a return to the aesthetic his first collaboration with Benjamin, “Into the Little Hill,” a 2006 retelling of the Pied Piper legend. (They went on to create the well-traveled psychosexual thriller “Written on Skin,” as well as a similar follow-up, “Lessons in Love and Violence.”) Here, in what makes for a natural double bill with “Little Hill,” Crimp draws from folk tale, the Alexander Romance, Christianity and Buddhism for a synthesis not unlike Wagner’s grab-bag approach to mythology.The woman encounters several archetypal personalities on her quest, a journey redolent of the Little Prince among the planets, or Alice in Wonderland. There are a pair of lovers, an erstwhile artisan, a composer and a collector. In a series of scenes, subtly linked in Benjamin’s score but operating as discrete set pieces, these people present as happy but crumble at the slightest scrutiny or self-disclosure. Only Zabelle, a seeming mirror image of the woman, has the wisdom to offer her something more like contentment, and salvation.In Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma’s straightforward, intimate production at the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, each scene fluidly emerges from three walls that wrap around the stage. Marie La Rocca’s unintrusive costumes differentiate the characters, who are played by a small cast in multiple roles: the soprano Beate Mordal, nimbly lyrical as a lover and the composer; the elegant countertenor Cameron Shahbazi as the other lover, weaving darkly sensual lines, and the composer’s assistant; and the baritone John Brancy as the artisan and the collector.Crebassa, left, and the baritone John Brancy, a standout in “Picture a Day Like This.”Jean-Louis FernandezBrancy is given some of Benjamin’s most adventurous vocal writing in the piece, and rises to it with impressive skill — seamless passaggio between the richly resonant depths of his range and a weightless, dreamy falsetto, about three and a half octaves from a low B flat to a soprano E.Special care appears to have been given, as well, to the soprano Anna Prohaska as Zabelle, her sympathetic stage presence feeding Benjamin’s firm yet humane music for her, and vice versa. In Zabelle’s scene, what is described in the libretto as her garden is rendered in video projections by the artist Hicham Berrada that show a barren aquarium as it blooms with surreal, alien life alluringly lush and menacing.As the woman, the mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa is determined but aching, her resolute manner betrayed by tense vibrato or wide-eyed concern. It’s through her that Benjamin, who also conducted the excellent players of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the pit, ties together his episodic score. Her reading the sheet of paper is accompanied by a motif of muted trumpets and a trombone; tubular bells, quietly embedded in each scene’s climax, suggest a clock striking, and time running out.Her race against time, however, is less important in the end than the woman’s epiphanic encounter with Zabelle. Whether that leads to happiness is impossible to say in a day, and is as ambiguous as Benjamin’s music itself, which despite its immaculate construction is never obviously representational or tidily resolved.Collin Shay, at center singing into a loudspeaker, and other performers in the 15-person ensemble of Phillip Venables and Ted Huffman’s new show, seen here in its premiere at the Manchester International Festival in England a week before its opening at Aix.Tristram KentonAmbivalent, too, is Venables and Huffman’s show, “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” at the Pavillon Noir. This music theater adaptation of the cult classic Larry Mitchell book of the same name from 1977, with illustrations by Ned Asta, recasts queer history in mythic, utopian terms in opposition to the patriarchy, referred to as “the Men.” (Among the work’s co-commissioners is NYU Skirball in New York, where it will travel next year.) Whereas the ’70s fable ends with uncertainty, Venables and Huffman take the story even further, introducing a cautionary tale of assimilation and offering a vision for life after the revolutions that Mitchell said “will engulf us all.”The last collaboration between Venables, a composer, and Huffman, a writer and director, was the 2019 opera “Denis & Katya,” a chamber piece based on the true story of two Russian teenagers who a few years earlier had run away from home, hidden in a cabin and died in a shootout with police. Barely more than an hour long, yet smoothly layered and ethically complex, that work was fundamentally about how stories are formed and told.And how they are performed; “Denis & Katya” existed in a theatrical space, occupied by two singers and four cellists, but also decorated with projections of Venables and Huffman’s correspondence, devoid of hierarchy or operatic tradition. It’s a concept the creators take even further in their new show, an astonishing feat of controlled chaos in which an ensemble of 15 does it all: sings, narrates, dances, plays instruments.Venables’s score is a delirious stylistic fantasia, with elements of folk, jazzy turns of phrase and Baroque instrumentation. He exercises a restraint similar to Benjamin’s, and is explicit, to comic effect, only when he is at his most prurient: An episode near the beginning recounts “the ritual” of cruising, building toward a climax of “ecstatic communion” and the exchange of something vulgar that can’t be repeated here, before the music quickly subsides to a piano. The Richard Strauss of “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Symphonia Domestica” would be proud.Throughout the show, no one artist can be easily described, because no one artist has a defined role. This approach to theater-making, in which each performer is essential to the whole, is particularly suited to the spirit of Mitchell’s book and its roots in his time at the Lavender Hill commune for gay men and lesbians in upstate New York.Kit Green, left, and Yandass, two of the show’s narrators.Tristram KentonBut some of the performers are given a little brighter spotlight. The musical direction of Yshani Perinpanayagam, an agile instrumentalist, holds the group together in crucial moments. Two of the narrators naturally stand out: Yandass, a dynamo of speech delivery and dance, and Kit Green, a presence at once charismatic, commanding and thoroughly comedic. Venable’s score is at its most patient showcasing the vocal beauty of Deepa Johnny and Katherine Goforth, but also reveals flashes of Collin Shay’s gifted countertenor (not to mention their talent at a keyboard).That the performers are presented as such — a group of artists sharing Mitchell’s fable rather than embodying it, as they constantly break the fourth wall — also helps to sidestep some of the book’s dated, peak-hippie politics. Venables and Huffman treat the non-Men other as a universal concept that applies, extremely broadly, to anyone oppressed. But a passage that warns against assimilation, of “looking like the Men,” has a narrower focus. Blending in is a distinctly white, gay, bourgeois luxury; not for nothing was Pete Buttigieg the first openly queer person to stand a chance at the American presidency.Yet that contradiction, a dramaturgical wrinkle in an appropriately wrinkled show, is at the heart of queerness as an unfinished project — one still in search of, if not Mitchell’s utopia, then some kind of post-liberation happiness. And that will take time. More

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      On Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, the World Is Her Ball

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      The pop superstar’s first solo outing in seven years draws on the dance-music cultures that inspired her 2022 album, and her work that led up to that ecstatic release.It was a crowd that had come to dance, dressed for a rodeo in the distant future: sparkling cowboy hats, silvery fringe, outré sunglasses and any other sartorial detail that represented “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s dazzling seventh album and the occasion for her first solo tour in seven years. But as the imperial pop superstar took the stage at the Rogers Center in Toronto on Saturday night for the first North American show of her Renaissance World Tour, she reminded the club-ready audience just who was in charge. Because if they were prepared to move, she was going to make them wait a little longer.Setting the table for a two-and-a-half-hour performance that was visually spectacular, vocally ambitious and sometimes tonally confused, Beyoncé, 41 — clad in a glimmering chain-mail mini dress — began the show with a nearly 30-minute stretch of ballads and deep cuts that harked back to her past: an acrobatically sung solo rendition of the 2001 Destiny’s Child track “Dangerously in Love,” a bit of “Flaws and All” from the deluxe edition of her 2007 album “B’Day,” and the sparse, soulful “1+1” from 2011, which she belted atop a mirrored piano.Few seats in the stadium provided a legible view of Beyoncé’s expressive face, though the screen took care of that. The New York TimesIt was a both a display of her vocal agility and a curiously traditional way to start a show centered around an album as conceptually bold and forward-thinking as “Renaissance” — a sprawling, knowingly referential romp through the history of dance music, with an emphasis on the contributions of Black and queer innovators. Here, instead, was a stopover in Beyoncé’s Middle Ages.As a live entertainer, though, she has earned a fresh start. The Renaissance World Tour shows are some of Beyoncé’s first appearances since her dazzling, commanding performance headlining the 2018 Coachella festival (later released as the concert film and live album “Homecoming”), which served as a kind of mic-drop capstone to her career thus far. It would be futile to repeat that, and difficult to top it. The loose, fluid “Renaissance,” still said to be the first part of a trilogy, represents a new chapter in Beyoncé’s recorded oeuvre. And once the show finally found its center and, however belatedly, welcomed the crowd to the Renaissance, it heralded her maturity as a performer, too.The show’s look — as projected in diamond-sharp definition onto a panoramic screen — conjured Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” by way of the 1990 drag ball documentary “Paris Is Burning.” After a lengthy video introduction, Beyoncé emerged from a chrome cocoon and vamped through a thrilling stretch of the first suite of “Renaissance” songs; during “Cozy,” most strikingly, a pair of hydraulic robotic arms centered her body in industrial picture frames, like a post-human Mona Lisa.In May, when Beyoncé began the European leg of the Renaissance World Tour, rumors swirled that she may have been recovering from a foot injury, since her choreography was a bit more static and less stomp-heavy than usual. The Toronto show did nothing to dispel that chatter, but it also showed that it doesn’t matter much. Perhaps because of some constraints, Beyoncé has embraced new means of bodily expression. She brought the flavor of ball movements into the show and served face all night, curling her lip like a hungry predator, widening her eyes in mock surprise, scrunching her features in exaggerated disgust.The full grandeur of the stage was not visible from many of the side seats, making the band and sometimes the dancers difficult to see.The New York TimesFew seats in the stadium provided a legible view of Beyoncé’s face, of course, though the screen took care of that. She played expertly to the cameras that followed her every choreographed move, aware of how she’d appear to the majority of the audience and — perhaps just as crucially — in FOMO-inducing social media videos. The stage itself was breathtaking, featuring an arced cutout section of the screen that made for playful visuals, but its full grandeur was not visible from many of the side seats, making the band and sometimes the dancers difficult to see.The screen, though, was the point. Beyoncé’s two solo releases before “Renaissance” — her 2013 self-titled album and “Lemonade,” from 2016 — were billed as “visual albums,” featuring a fully realized music video for each track. Again toying with her fans’ anticipation, she has still not released any videos from “Renaissance,” giving the previously unseen graphics that filled her expansive backdrop an added impact, and making them feel more weighty than a convenient way to pass time between costume changes.Many of the tour’s outfits struck a balance between Beyoncé’s signature styles — megawatt sparkles, high-cut bodysuits — and the futuristic bent of “Renaissance.” She played haute couture bee in custom Mugler by Casey Cadwallader and glimmered in a Gucci corset draped with crystals. But the night’s most memorable look — so instantly iconic that a few fans had already tried to replicate it, from photos of the European shows — was a flesh-tone catsuit by the Spanish label Loewe, embellished with a few suggestively placed, red-fingernailed hands.Throughout the set, Beyoncé wove interpolations of her predecessors’ songs throughout her own, as if to place her music in a larger continuum. The grandiose “I Care” segued into a bit of “River Deep, Mountain High,” in honor of Tina Turner, who died in May. The cheery throwback “Love on Top” contained elements of the Jackson 5’s “Want You Back.” Most effective was the “Queens Remix” she performed of “Break My Soul,” which mashes up the “Renaissance” leadoff single with Madonna’s “Vogue,” paying homage to the mainstream pop star who brought queer ball culture to the masses before her. (The merch on sale at a Renaissance Tour pop-up shop in the days before the show included a hand-held fan emblazoned with the song title “Heated” for $40. It sold out.)The show contained moments that sometimes felt conceptually cluttered and at odds with the “Renaissance” album’s sharp vision, like dorm-room-poster quotes from Albert Einstein and Jim Morrison that filled the screen during video montages. The middle stretch, arriving with a lively “Formation,” featured Beyoncé and her dancers clad in camo print, riding and occasionally writhing atop a prop military vehicle. There was a wordless, gestural power in the moment she and her entourage held their fists in the air, referencing a salute that had rankled some easily rankle-able viewers of the 2016 Super Bowl Halftime Show. But if Beyoncé was calling for any more specific forms of protest or political awareness — especially in a moment when drag culture and queer expression are being threatened at home and throughout the world — those went unarticulated.At the end of the long night, Beyoncé floated above the crowd like a deity on a glittering horse for “Summer Renaissance.”The New York TimesBeyoncé’s endurance as a world-class performer remained the show’s raison d’être; she is the rare major pop star who prizes live vocal prowess. By the end of the long night — and especially during the striking closing number, the disco reverie “Summer Renaissance,” when she floated above the crowd like a deity on a glittering horse — she extended the microphone to lend out some of the high notes to her eager and adoring fans. “Until next time,” she said, keeping the stage banter relatively minimal and pat. “Drive home safe!”Even when Beyoncé embraces styles and cultures known for their improvisational looseness, she still seems to be striving toward perfection — a pageant smile always threatens to break through the stank face. Commanding a stadium-sized audience, she was an introvert wearing an extrovert’s armor. That tension is part of both her boundless charm and her occasional limitations as a performer. And it makes moments of genuine spontaneity all the more prized.Naturally, #RenaissanceWorldTour was trending on Twitter long after the show, but one of the clips that went viral was unplanned. During a rousing performance of her early hit “Diva,” Beyoncé accidentally dropped her sunglasses. She fumbled them for a second, mouthed an expletive as they fell to the ground, and gave a sincere, shrugging grin before snapping back into the choreography’s formation. For a fleeting moment, she seemed human after all. More

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      Is Aretha Franklin’s True Will the One Found in the Couch or a Cabinet?

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      A trial starting on Monday is to decide whether either of two handwritten documents represents the singer’s last wishes. Her sons have battled in court for years over the question.At first, Aretha Franklin’s family believed the division of her estate after her death in 2018 would be a straightforward task: Without a known will, the celebrated singer’s assets would be equally distributed among her four sons.But months after Franklin’s funeral, a family member found documents, scrawled by hand and outlining her wishes — one set under a couch cushion in her home in suburban Detroit, another in a locked cabinet — plunging the estate into uncertainty.In the four years since, Franklin’s sons have battled in a Michigan probate court over which of the conflicting documents should take precedence. On Monday, the issue heads to trial, with the precise distribution of Franklin’s remaining fortune, property and music rights at stake.“I think they all wish this had been settled a week after she passed away,” said Craig A. Smith, a lawyer for Edward Franklin, the singer’s second eldest son. “But they’re not blaming anyone — it is what it is.”At issue in the trial is which document best reflects Franklin’s wishes before she died, at age 76, of pancreatic cancer.Two of her sons, Edward and Kecalf Franklin, assert that the document found in a spiral notebook under the couch cushions, which is dated March 2014 and substantially favors Kecalf, should be considered primary. Another son, Ted White Jr., contends that the papers found in the cabinet, dated June 2010, should take precedence.The jury could also decide that neither document is a legitimate will, reverting back to an even division of the singer’s estate between her children, based on Michigan law. There is also a possible combined solution in which items from both documents would be taken into account.Franklin’s eldest son, Clarence Franklin, who has a mental illness and is under a legal guardianship, has long been a player in the legal jockeying, as the 2014 will would appear to cause him to inherit significantly less than his brothers. But in recent weeks, his representatives reached a settlement for an undisclosed percentage of the estate. As a result, they will not be taking a side in the trial, said Joseph Buttiglieri, a lawyer for Clarence Franklin’s guardian.A pathbreaking musician acclaimed as the Queen of Soul, Franklin won 18 Grammy Awards, had more than 100 singles on the Billboard charts, and left behind the trappings of a star: four homes, several cars, furs, jewelry and gold records. The total estate was estimated at about $18 million after she died, Mr. Smith said, though another appraisal suggested the figure might be lower.But Franklin, who was known to be intensely private about her finances, also left a significant tax liability. In 2021, her estate reached a deal with the Internal Revenue Service to pay off about $8 million in federal income taxes by setting aside a portion of any new revenue from music royalties or projects like the recent Hollywood biopic starring Jennifer Hudson.At the heart of the trial are more than a dozen pages of Franklin’s scrawled-out wishes, filled with crossed out words and insertions. The process of interpreting a deceased person’s intentions from the lines of a handwritten document can be a confusing, contentious process, one that made for a gripping story line in the HBO series “Succession.” In the show’s final season, the family patriarch’s heirs struggled to decode penciled-in addendums to his last wishes that were found locked in a safe.The effort to determine Franklin’s true desires has turned up three voice mail messages, recorded months before the singer died, in which she discussed another will that she had been preparing with an estate lawyer, Henry Grix.In the messages, which were played in court earlier this year, Franklin said she had already decided some details around her estate, including that she wanted her pianos to be auctioned off at Sotheby’s, but she noted that she was leaving other decisions for a future meeting at the lawyer’s office.Franklin’s estate after her death had an estimated value of $18 million, according to a lawyer for one of her sons.Pool photo by Paul SancyaTed White Jr., whose father had been Franklin’s manager and first husband, asked that the court favor documents that had been drafted by Mr. Grix, an experienced estate planning lawyer, in the final three years of the singer’s life, arguing that it was the most recent expression of her wishes. But the judge overseeing the case, Jennifer S. Callaghan, excluded the documents from consideration in the trial, citing testimony from Mr. Grix maintaining that he had been left with the impression that Franklin “hadn’t made up her mind” about the will.“It is clear to this court,” Judge Callaghan wrote in a May decision, “that the attorney who was retained to personally memorialize the Decedent’s estate plan did not believe that the Decedent had yet reached a final, complete plan.”That leaves two documents for the six-person jury to consider.In the 2014 document, three of Franklin’s sons — excluding Clarence — would receive equal shares of their mother’s music royalties, but the distribution of her personal property would be weighted toward Kecalf. According to the document, Kecalf would receive two of four homes and the singer’s cars, the number of which is not specified.In court papers, a lawyer for Kecalf Franklin argued that the 2014 document should be considered a legal will because it is the most recent handwritten document by Franklin outlining her plans. (There is a dispute over whether the singer officially signed the document. One side says a smiley face paired with “Franklin” represents her signature on the final page of the document; the other has disagreed.)The singer’s heirs have disputed whether the smiley face next to “Franklin,” included on one of two conflicting documents, constitutes a legitimate signature.Oakland County Probate CourtMr. Smith said that although his client, Edward Franklin, would benefit more financially if the wills were deemed invalid, his client supports the 2014 document because he believes “that’s what Aretha wanted.”In steadfast opposition to the 2014 will is Mr. White, whose lawyer, Kurt A. Olson, wrote in court papers: “If this document were intended to be a will there would have been more care than putting it in a spiral notebook under a couch cushion.”As evidence in support of the 2010 document, which specifies weekly and monthly allowances for the four sons, Mr. Olson pointed to the fact that it was notarized and that Franklin had signed each page.Mr. White has yet to sign off on the settlement reached around Clarence Franklin’s piece of the estate, and it will ultimately be subject to the judge’s approval.Witnesses in the trial, which is expected to last less than a week in Oakland County Probate Court in Pontiac, Mich., are likely to include some of Franklin’s sons; the person who notarized the 2010 estate document; a handwriting expert; and a niece of the singer’s, Sabrina Owens, who discovered the potential wills in 2019. Ms. Owens had initially served as Franklin’s personal representative — similar to the role of executor — until strife within the family prompted her resignation.Nicholas E. Papasifakis, a Michigan estate lawyer, currently serves as Franklin’s personal representative and is not taking a side in the dispute between the heirs.After the trial has concluded and the estate has been settled, there will still be issues that will require cooperation within the fractured family. Biopics or tribute concerts would require universal agreement, unless the heirs were to appoint a business manager to manage such decisions, said Mr. Smith, the lawyer representing Edward Franklin.“We’re hoping that everyone gets along a little better after this has been resolved,” he said. More

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      in Music

      Peter Nero, Pianist Who Straddled Genres, Is Dead at 89

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      He soared to popularity with a swinging hybrid of classics and jazz. He later conducted the Philly Pops, often with one hand while the other played piano. Peter Nero, the concert pianist who soared to popularity in the 1960s with a swinging hybrid of classics and jazz and kept the beat for nearly six decades with albums, club and television dates, and segues into conducting pops orchestras, died on Thursday in Eustis, Fla. He was 89.His daughter, Beverly Nero, said he died at the At Home Care Assisted Living Facility, where he had lived in recent months.It was not quite accurate to say, as a New York newspaper, The World-Telegram and Sun, did in 1962, that Mr. Nero played classical music with his left hand and pop-jazz with his right. But that was only a paraphrase of his own primer for audiences.“We shall play ‘Tea for Two,’” he would say. “Since our arrangement is complex, we’d like to explain what we’ll be doing. My right hand will be playing ‘Tea for Two,’ while my left hand will play Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. My left foot will be fiercely tapping out the traditional rhythm to the Tahitian fertility dance. My right foot will not be doing too much. It will just be excited.”To generations of fans, Mr. Nero was a national treasure. He appeared with Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and other headliners; released 72 albums; conducted the Philly Pops for 34 years, often with one hand while the other played a piano; and delivered a nostalgic mix of jazz and classics that let listeners reconnect with the soundtracks of their youth.A remarkable interpreter of Gershwin, he was also a natural showman — bantering with audiences, making up the program as he went along, tearing through medleys of Liszt, Prokofiev, the American songbook and mesmerizing variations of “I Got Rhythm,” and pounding home with a blowout finale of “An American in Paris.”In midcareer, Mr. Nero quit smoky piano lounges for the concert stage and reinvented himself as a player-conductor of the Philly Pops and other orchestras. He wrote a cantata based on the diary of Anne Frank, marked national holidays with patriotic musicales in Philadelphia, and for decades packed them in at symphony halls, college unions and small-town community centers.Mr. Nero rehearsing before a BBC telecast in 1965.Central Press, via Getty Images“Still touring the country at 80, Nero presented a dazzling display of talent and showmanship,” The Times-Enterprise of Thomasville, Ga. (population 18,000), said in a 2015 review. “Nero’s stamina was incredible, his nimble fingers dancing gracefully, then racing madly, then dancing gracefully again across the keys to sublime effect.”A child prodigy from Brooklyn, he mastered the classical keyboard at 7 and at 11 performed Haydn concertos. He won a talent contest run by the New York radio station WQXR, impressing Vladimir Horowitz, one of the judges. He made his national television debut at 17, playing “Rhapsody in Blue” on a special hosted by the bandleader Paul Whiteman.In 1955, uncertain if he wanted to be a classical pianist, he heard recordings by the great jazz pianist Art Tatum. Hooked, he began performing at nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas, and gradually evolved the fluid Nero métier of classical and jazz.His name was still Bernie Nierow at the time. But when he signed a recording contract in 1960, it was as Peter Nero.He had a hit with his first RCA album, “Piano Forte” (1961), which showcased his stylistic range. “One was Mozartean, the next one was in the style of Rachmaninoff, the next was a straight ballad and another was a jazz approach,” he told The Daily Oklahoman of the selections on the album. “The idea was to see what came out of this, and the response was that everybody liked something different.”He won Grammys in 1961 (best new artist) and 1962 (best performance with an orchestra, for “The Colorful Peter Nero”) and was nominated for eight more. He appeared often on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” In 1963, he wrote the score for the film “Sunday in New York,” a romantic comedy starring Jane Fonda, Rod Taylor and Cliff Robertson. (Mr. Nero appeared briefly as himself.)His career took off. He had a million-selling single on Columbia Records with an instrumental version of the theme from “Summer of ’42,” the 1971 blockbuster film, with a score by Michel Legrand, about the end of one young man’s adolescence as America plunged into World War II. His album of the same name also sold a million copies.In the 1970s Mr. Nero quit nightclubs and turned to composing for, and conducting, orchestras.Anne Frank’s posthumously published “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which told of two years of hiding during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, provided lyrics and scenario for Mr. Nero’s first composition for a full orchestra. He used her words for 15 songs and vividly recalled his collaboration with a girl who had died in a concentration camp a quarter of a century earlier.“Writing ‘Anne Frank’ was perhaps the most emotional experience of my musical life,” Mr. Nero said in a 2018 interview for this obituary. “I was so moved by the diary, I wanted to do something almost biblical. I wrote the bulk of it in just three weeks. Once I got on a roll, I couldn’t stop. Everything just fell into place.“Anne was way advanced for her years,” he continued. “She was not just religious or spiritual. What came through was her faith in the goodness of man.”Mr. Nero’s was the first musical treatment of a story widely known from film, television and theatrical dramas, and from books in many languages. A blend of rock, symphonic and traditional Jewish music, it had its debut at a synagogue in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, in 1971, and was performed under his baton in several cities. In 1973, he conducted the Greater Trenton Symphony in a version that featured his 15-year-old daughter, Beverly, in the title role.In 1979, Mr. Nero was named musical director and player-conductor of the Philly Pops. He moved to Media, Pa., near Philadelphia, and for 34 years was the Pops’ star attraction. Audiences marveled at his ability, standing up, to play the piano with one hand while seamlessly conducting the orchestra with the other. He also conducted orchestras in Tulsa, Washington, South Florida, St. Louis and other cities, often performing 100 concerts a year.Mr. Nero conducting the Philly Pops at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 2005. He was the orchestra’s musical director for 34 years.Marc Andrew Deley/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesHe had his detractors. Some deplored the liberties he took in blurring the lines between classical and jazz, although what he did was hardly new; the Gershwins had done it, as had, among others, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. Mr. Nero made light of his critics.“I did an arrangement that mixed the ‘1812’ Overture and ‘Over the Rainbow,’” he recalled. “Somebody called and said, ‘How can you do that to “Over the Rainbow”?’”He was born Bernard Nierow in Brooklyn on May 22, 1934, one of two sons of Julius and Mary (Menasche) Nierow. His father was a deputy commissioner of the New York City Youth Board. His mother taught Spanish at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.Bernard began piano lessons at 7 and showed extraordinary ability. His parents bought him a used Steinway. “It was $1,100, which was a lot of money back then,” he recalled. “It was the only time they borrowed money.”He attended the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), studied part time at the Juilliard School of Music and took private lessons from the esteemed pedagogues Abram Chasins and Constance Keene. He attended Brooklyn College — he studied psychology but not music, he said, because he didn’t need to — and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1956.That year he married Marcia Dunner. They had two children, Jedd and Beverly, and were later divorced. His 1977 marriage to Peggy Altman and his later marriage to Rebecca Edie, a Philly Pops pianist, also ended in divorce.Besides his daughter, Mr. Nero is survived by his son, Jedd; three grandchildren; and his brother, Alan.Mr. Nero left the Philly Pops in 2013 in an acrimonious dispute over his $500,000-a-year salary. The orchestra, whose fading audiences prompted it to file for bankruptcy, asked him to take a big pay cut, but he refused. Despite its shaky finances, the orchestra has survived, although it was recently evicted from its longtime home and its future looks uncertain.Mr. Nero returned to the concert circuit with his longtime bassist, Michael Barnett. They played their last gig on Valentine’s Day 2016 at a Central Florida retirement community, the Villages. Mr. Nero had lived there since 2018. More