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      Review: A Young Pianist Finds His Way to Carnegie Hall

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      Mao Fujita’s playing had a prettiness all its own, but he didn’t connect profoundly with all the composers on his largely safe program.The 24-year-old pianist Mao Fujita made his Carnegie Hall debut on Wednesday, shuffling onto the stage of Stern Auditorium, his demeanor unassuming and his back slightly hunched. When his fingers touched the keys, though, waves of airy filigree, beautifully formed and finished, emerged in almost uninterrupted streams for his two-hour solo recital.Having released a recording of Mozart’s complete piano sonatas in the fall, Fujita began his recital with two pieces by that composer. Fujita’s genteel statement of the theme in the Nine Variations on a Minuet by J.P. Duport gave over quickly to rippling runs that would have felt too fast if not for his pearly tone. That exuberance carried over into Mozart’s Sonata in D Major, K. 311, and even at such speed, the music had buoyancy, like a kite held aloft in a breeze.Fujita’s playing, gossamer without sacrificing the sturdy consonance of Mozart’s style, has a prettiness all its own. He plays through the ends of phrases, bringing them to a fine point with exquisitely shaped diminuendos, and maintains a clear yet shimmery tone.Comparing the sonata with Fujita’s recorded version, I missed the cleanly delineated treatment of Mozart’s contrapuntal writing, which Fujita approached on the album with Bach-like clarity and independence of line. At Carnegie, Fujita’s left-hand parts sometimes sounded smeared — perhaps because their subtlety didn’t read in the hall — and there was a presentational quality to his playing, as though he were offering it to the public for judgment.At times, Fujita didn’t connect profoundly with the composers on this largely safe program. Even in the most stylistically attuned hands, Liszt’s Ballade No. 2 in B Minor risks coming across as overwrought, and Fujita’s traversals of the keyboard sounded superficial rather than splashy. In Brahms’s Theme and Variations in D Minor, dedicated to Clara Schumann, for whom he pined, Fujita gestured at the piece’s muscularity by firmly articulating its chords, but the performance lacked depth of sound — and the sense of a body leaning into the keyboard to unburden an emotional weight. Still, placid passages in both pieces glinted.Fujita didn’t linger over the harmonies of Clara Schumann’s Three Romances, Op. 21, instead using them to propel himself forward, and something clicked in the last movement, a glimmering Agitato that he colored in shades of twilight. After laying down the final G minor chord with touching delicacy, he immediately jumped into a piece in the same key, Robert Schumann’s Second Piano Sonata.Playing at furious speed, angsty and furtive, the melody peeking in and out view, Fujita seemed transformed. Where some pianists use the right-hand octaves to crown the motion of the first movement, Fujita dispatched them efficiently, as if they too were caught in the swirl of Schumann’s wildness. The audience clapped excitedly after the movement, either inspired by its feeling or thinking they were applauding the end of Clara’s Romances.In his criticism and music, Schumann sometimes wrote in the style of two distinct personalities that he named Florestan and Eusebius, and Fujita handled the pendulum swings between them — spiraling tempestuousness on the one hand, starry serenity on the other — with purposefulness and direction in the final movement.The pieces by the Schumanns would have been the recital’s highlight were it not for Fujita’s first encore, the opening Allegro from Mozart’s infectious “Sonata Facile.” Here, Fujita outdid his recording of this music and also the Mozart earlier in the program, trading the piece’s usual extroversion for beguiling interiority, with cheeky ornaments of his own devising and an approach to melody that, admittedly, might have been too free. The uniformly pretty tone was still there — but there was also the confidence of an artist who was sharing not only some music but something of himself with his audience. More

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      Sam Smith Seeks Self-Acceptance and Catharsis on ‘Gloria’

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      On the British musician’s fourth album, “Gloria,” Smith puts aside ballads for more danceable tracks that show flashes of boldness, but often retreat to generics.Since the release of Sam Smith’s soulful 2014 smash “Stay With Me,” the British singer and songwriter has been pop’s most high-profile balladeer of queer heartbreak, a crooner with a pure, buttery tone and an agile vocal range that can swoop from the depths of despair to an airy, yearning falsetto. Now, on the musician’s more upbeat and sensual fourth album, “Gloria,” Smith, who uses they/them pronouns, is singing a less dour tune.The album’s first single, “Love Me More,” is a bright, springy ode to self-acceptance, inspired by Smith’s increasing vulnerability in talking about their longtime struggles with body image. “Every day I’m trying not to hate myself,” they sing with wrenching candor, “but lately it’s not hurting like it did before.” “Love Me More” transcends the limitations of one-dimensional “empowerment pop” because it doesn’t downplay the intensity of Smith’s challenges and, refreshingly, suggests that self-love is an ongoing process.But the “Gloria” song that became Smith’s first No. 1 hit in the United States is something else entirely: “Unholy,” a campy, devilish romp with a hook that cleverly utilizes the double harmonic scale and features a guest verse from the German pop singer Kim Petras. (Smith and Petras became the first nonbinary person and the first openly transgender woman to reach the top of the Hot 100.) The appeal of “Unholy” comes from the way it wags a lusty finger at holier-than-thou puritanism and presents queerness as the basis of aesthetic liberation. “Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot at the body shop,” Smith sings with a knowing, beckoning wink. It sounds like the most fun they’ve ever had on a song.Much of “Gloria” aims for a similar sense of ecstatic catharsis and looks for it where Smith’s career began: on the dance floor. The forlorn pianos and light percussion of Smith’s signature ballads have largely been swapped out for synthesizers and electronic beats. The thumping neo-house “Lose You” harkens back to Smith’s early breakout appearances on U.K. dance hits like Disclosure’s “Latch” and Naughty Boy’s “La La La,” while the sleek, glittery “I’m Not Here to Make Friends” (which was produced by the E.D.M. hitmaker Calvin Harris) taps into the pop-disco revival ignited by artists like Dua Lipa and Jessie Ware, taking its shout-along hook from a common reality show refrain.As on “Unholy,” Smith’s arrangements often feature prominent and inventive use of backing singers. While some pop musicians of more limited vocal range employ choirs to hit notes they cannot reach, the nimble-voiced Smith always sounds, more organically, like a member of the chorus who has simply stepped to the forefront for a solo. Smith hammers that point home on the grandiose hymn “Gloria,” but makes it more subtly and effectively on the excellent “No God,” a moody, midtempo R&B number that reads a stubborn ex-lover the riot act. “You’re no god, you’re no teacher, you’re no saint, you’re no leader,” Smith sings with silky venom, while a group of bass vocalists offer some sonorous no-no-no-nos in agreement.But the quality varies across the 12-track album, which Smith wrote with their longtime collaborator Jimmy Napes and a rotating cast of other contributors. The dancehall-influenced “Gimme” has the libidinousness of “Unholy” but little of its charm, centered around a gratingly repetitive hook from the Canadian musician Jessie Reyez, who also makes an appearance on the similarly uninspired “Perfect.” The album’s final track, “Who We Love,” is its gravest misstep, a schmaltzy duet with Ed Sheeran that plays it safe and blunts the force of Smith’s previously idiosyncrasy. “It’s not a feeling you can run from, ’cause we love who we love,” Smith and Sheeran sing, blandly sloganeering. If it’s meant to be a romantic duet between them, it lacks a spark. If, more likely, it’s meant to be a message of allyship from a straight artist, it’s giving Macklemore.“Gloria” has moments of boldness, but its occasional lapses into generics keep it from feeling like a major personal statement. “Nobody taught you how to cry, but somebody showed you how to lie,” Smith sings on the acoustic-guitar-driven “How to Cry,” a well-intentioned call for vulnerability that nonetheless revolves around a simplistic melody and rhymes so obvious, the listener will be able to predict them before each line ends. Smith’s voice, as ever, is effortlessly dazzling, but it can certainly handle more challenging material. Maybe they are an Elton John in need of a Bernie Taupin.Sam Smith“Gloria”(Capitol) More

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      Blackpink, Aespa, NewJeans: The Evolution of K-Pop Girl Groups

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicOver the past few years, Blackpink has emerged as a worldwide force — hit singles, huge tours, influence in the fashion world — becoming perhaps the first K-pop girl group to reap the full benefits of the genre’s globalization. Standing on the shoulders of earlier innovators like Girls’ Generation and 2NE1, it has become a pop standard-bearer all around the world.It also has been joined in recent years by a slew of other girl groups with growing profiles and unique personalities: Itzy, Aespa, Ive, and the most recent microgeneration, NewJeans and Le Sserafim.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the different paths girl groups have had to traverse compared to their male peers, the manner in which they blend music and storytelling and how the worldwide spread of K-pop has amplified opportunities for them.Guest:Tamar Herman, who writes about K-pop for Billboard, Forbes and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      In Chicago, ‘Opera Can Be Hip-Hop, and Hip-Hop Can Be Opera’

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      The baritone Will Liverman was singing in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” about five years ago when he watched a documentary about Jonathan Larson and his musical “Rent.”“It talked about how ‘Rent’ came to be, and how this guy had the idea of taking ‘La Bohème’ and updating it,” Liverman said in an interview this month. “I was wondering why more classics aren’t updated — taking them for ourselves and spinning a new narrative that reclaims the story and tells something that’s meaningful for us.”Then he visited a Black barbershop, and an idea hit him: This could be the setting for a new take on the Rossini, like “La Bohème,” one of the most beloved operas in the repertory. “The thing is,” Liverman said, “I didn’t really take agency over writing anything because of feeling like I was just a singer. I was like, man, someone should do this.”The years since have proven that Liverman isn’t just a singer. An enterprising artist on the rise, he has not only become a fixture of contemporary works at the Metropolitan Opera, including a star turn in Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” last season, but also shepherded new commissions. And now, with his old friend DJ King Rico, he has taken on composing as well.Together they have updated “Barber,” loosely adapting its story into one about a barbershop on the South Side of Chicago and blending operatic writing with a kaleidoscope of styles like R&B, funk, hip-hop, gospel, rap and, of course, barbershop quartet. Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj joined them, collaborating on the show’s book and becoming its dramaturg and director. The result, “The Factotum” — its title recalls the famous Rossini aria “Largo al factotum” — opens Feb. 3 at Lyric Opera of Chicago.Liverman, 34, and DJ King Rico, 33, met as teenagers at the Governor’s School for the Arts in Virginia. There, they found a mentor in Robert Brown, a teacher with a gospel background who taught them, young Black men, what place they could have in a world like opera, and how free the art form could be.“We had someone to look up to that looked like us, that taught us what opera was but also could get on the keys and play the craziest rendition of anything you ever heard,” Liverman said. “That’s what really sparked it all, before we even knew what was inside of us. He instilled that.”On the bus, the pair would hold court, singing songs like Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz’s “Get Low” in classical voices. “The girls would go crazy,” DJ King Rico said; but more important, the playfulness taught him “that opera can be hip-hop, and hip-hop can be opera. It’s the same notes.”In a joint video interview, Liverman and DJ King Rico talked about writing “The Factotum,” and the place it might come to have in the opera world. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.“The possibilities just seemed endless,” Liverman said about composing an opera.Lawrence Agyei for The New York TimesComposing opera is new for both of you. How has it felt to be working in this mode?DJ KING RICO When Will hit me up about this, that was the farthest thing from my mind. I sang opera in high school; I did it for two years. That was really cool, but then I went the other route. So, when he came back, what immediately started playing in my mind was like, OK, we’re going to make this us. It’s going to be really, really authentic.WILL LIVERMAN The exciting thing was, the possibilities just seemed endless. There was a lot of trial and error — figuring out how the operatic voice can serve these styles we know and love. We were in the studio; we’d record something and listen back to it a bunch of times and really pinpoint what things were working and what things we could fix.DJ KING RICO For me, it’s been cool to play various roles. That’s what the factotum is — a jack-of-all-trades. Having to master a lot of different things throughout this process: writing the music, recording, engineering. Whatever helps the process move along, just removing the ego, and that has been transformational.There’s an added layer here, Will, of writing for yourself in the role of Mike.LIVERMAN It’s been a big discovery, because we’re also both the composers and librettists. I loved writing parodies back in the day; if TikTok was a thing in my 20s, I’d be all over that. But now, we noticed there are certain words that just sound so corny if you try to sing them operatically, like “That’s so dope.” And in these styles, you have to keep space for the operatic voice to feel natural.There were some things that I sing for my part that I had to rewrite because it’s like, Oh man, I need to actually breathe here, or do that. On the creating side, you also start thinking about vowels and certain words that speak better.Given how broad the range of styles is in this opera, how did you arrive at what sounded right for any given moment?DJ KING RICO I don’t think we ever arrived at what felt right completely until Rajendra came onboard. He helped complete the story line, and even now, in rehearsals we’re still fine-tuning. But as far as whether to use hip-hop or gospel or whatever — I think it’s more so the emotion that we want the audience to feel and what supports that.We used to play this Basquiat clip where he was like, “Black people are not represented in these spaces.” But we do exist here, and so we are being very intentional about being ourselves in this space. So, there’s this one song, “Conversation,” where it has all of the genres mixed up into one so you see all of the personalities of the different characters in the barbershop. We wanted it to feel a little bit chaotic, and authentic.About the barbershop. In Rajendra’s director’s note, he compares that space to the theater, as a gathering place. What did that idea open up for you in the opera’s story?LIVERMAN One of the cool things about going into a barbershop is, you never know who’s going to come in. Everybody needs to get their hair cut, from the gangster to the preacher to the teacher. It’s a safe space for us to really be and speak our truths. It’s so much more than a haircut. My hair was a mess about a month ago; I was looking like Moses in “The Ten Commandments.” But I go to my guy in Chicago, and I just listen in on the conversations — the openness, the honesty, the funny things, the joy. Then, at the end of it, I come out a new person. I feel like art has the power to do that.DJ KING RICO They definitely both provide community. And a work like this allows multiple people to come together. If you’ve seen the things in this story and been impacted by them, probably someone next to you has experienced the same thing. So, you can come together and feel joy in that.DJ King Rico at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. “Opera can be fun!” he said. “There’s room for everything.”Lawrence Agyei for The New York TimesThe Met Opera recently said, in something of a reversal, that contemporary works have become box office draws — including, Will, the sold-out run of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” that you were in. Not only were those seats full, but the audience was also visibly different. Do you see “The Factotum” aiming for something similar?DJ KING RICO Opera can be fun! There’s room for everything. And so if we’re going to put something like this on on a Friday, let’s make this a thing, a vibe. Let’s experience the art and then kick it after. There’s a renaissance that happening, and I’m just thankful that we’re a part of it. Because opera changed my life as a 14-year-old kid studying those scores. I feel like if we can continue to expand it and expand the audience, it can continue to do the same thing going forward for future generations.LIVERMAN I hope other artists look at this and see that anything’s possible. When you have a dream or that feeling, that inner voice saying “Do this,” do it. Like Rico said, one of the ways we think of the factotum is being a jack-of-all-trades. We put this together ourselves over a number of years, and I want it to be an inspiration for other artists to step outside a box that says “I have to just be in this one lane.”Then there are young kids of color. But there are also young kids period, and older people. I want this to be a story of humanity, like Rico said, coming together. You see so much of the sad mask in opera, but I think there’s something to be said, just as powerful, about joy and happiness. We need those stories, but we also need some of the things that make the heart feel good. More

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      Ticketmaster Called a ‘Monopoly’ at Senate Hearing Over Taylor Swift Debacle

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      The Judiciary Committee, responding to the bungled sale of Taylor Swift concert tickets, heard the company apologize and its critics trace the problem to the industry’s lack of competition.Live Nation Entertainment, the concert industry giant that owns Ticketmaster, came under withering attack during a Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday, with committee members from both parties criticizing it for the botched sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour and calling the company a monopoly that hinders competition and harms consumers.Over nearly three hours, senators pilloried a top Live Nation executive, Joe Berchtold, over the handling of Ms. Swift’s tickets last November and over longstanding allegations that the company badgers its competitors to win new business. Such bullying would be a violation of a Justice Department agreement that set conditions on the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010.“This is all the definition of monopoly,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “Live Nation is so powerful that it doesn’t even need to exert pressure. It doesn’t need to threaten. Because people just fall in line.”Some at the hearing went so far as to question whether the two companies, whose agreement with the Justice Department expires in 2025, should be broken up.Mr. Berchtold, Live Nation’s president and chief financial officer, acknowledged the problems with a presale for Ms. Swift’s tour, and apologized to the singer and her fans. When those tickets went on sale, millions of people were turned away. Technical problems also caused tickets to disappear from the online baskets of customers — whom Ticketmaster had approved through its Verified Fan system — as they were trying to buy them.At the hearing, both Republican and Democratic senators expressed concern about Live Nation’s dominance in the ticketing industry. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Berchtold largely attributed Ticketmaster’s failings to an assault from online bots: automated programs, run by scalpers, that seek to snatch up tickets before they ever make their way to consumers. That drew a largely skeptical response from the senators.“This is unbelievable,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said, with more than a hint of anger in her voice. “Why is it,” she added, “that you have not developed an algorithm to sort out what is a bot and what is a consumer?”Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, was even more blunt. “The way your company handled the ticket sales with Ms. Swift,” he said, “was a debacle.”The merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster united the world’s most powerful concert promoter and the biggest ticketing platform, creating a colossus without equal in the multibillion-dollar live music business.In 2019, the last full year unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic for which Live Nation has reported data, the company put on more than 40,000 events around the world and sold 485 million tickets. It owns or otherwise controls more than 300 venues around the world, far more than any other player in the business.In part because of its bulk and global reach, Live Nation has long been the target of complaints from competitors, who contend that the company’s size, and its control of Ticketmaster, give it an unfair advantage.Jerry Mickelson, a longtime independent concert promoter in Chicago, told the senators that a common frustration among the market’s smaller players is that Live Nation can profit from concerts put on by rival promoters because it still makes money through its control of Ticketmaster. “Pepsi doesn’t earn money from Coke,” he said. “But our competitor, Live Nation, makes money from selling tickets to our concerts.”Objections to Live Nation’s business have grown louder since 2019, when the Justice Department said that the company had “repeatedly violated” the terms of its regulatory agreement, called a consent decree.Justice Department investigators said that Live Nation had threatened venues that it would withhold tours under the company’s control if those venues did not sign deals with Ticketmaster, in violation of a key provision in the decree. Live Nation did not admit any wrongdoing, but in early 2020 the Justice Department extended the decree by five years.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, was among those at the hearing who raised the question of whether Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster should be undone.“If the Department of Justice establishes violations of the consent decree,” he said, “then unwinding the merger ought to be on the table.”Mr. Berchtold pushed back against many of the accusations, saying that Live Nation does not threaten venues; that those venues hold a great deal of leverage in negotiating ticketing contracts; and that new entrants like SeatGeek, a rival ticketing platform, have kept Ticketmaster on its toes. According to various estimates cited by the senators, Ticketmaster controls the ticketing at 70 to 80 percent of major concert venues in the United States. Mr. Berchtold said Live Nation’s estimate is 50 to 60 percent and he attributed its market share to the quality of its product.A small number of people demonstrated outside the Senate office building during the hearing, some holding signs referencing the Taylor Swift ticket debacle. Kenny Holston/The New York Times“We believe ticketing has never been more competitive,” he said.At the hearing, called “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” witnesses included other players in the concert business who described great difficulties competing against Live Nation.Jack Groetzinger, the chief executive of SeatGeek, said that venues are afraid of losing Live Nation concert tours if they do not sign with Ticketmaster. He said that is an obstacle for smaller companies like his in winning new business — though SeatGeek has been one of the more successful upstarts in ticketing in recent years, signing major clients like the Dallas Cowboys and Jujamcyn Theaters, one of the major Broadway theater owners.The panel also included a musician, Clyde Lawrence, of a small New York band called Lawrence. Dressed in a black suit, and with a scruffy head of hair, he joked that he could only dream of the crushing ticket demand enjoyed by Ms. Swift. But he described frustrations in dealing with Live Nation, such as the backstage costs it charges musicians, and the opacity of ticket surcharges, for which his band gets nothing.He described a typical show, where the face value of the ticket was $30, plus $12 in fees. Yet out of that $42 paid by the consumer, $30 was eaten up by the venue, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and another $6 went to the band’s touring expenses. “So that leaves us with $6 for an eight-piece band, pretax,” he said, “and we also have to pay our own health insurance.”In his questioning, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, honed in on a facet of Ticketmaster’s business, the resale marketplace that exists seamlessly within its online ticket sales platform, “where you’re forcing everyone in the resale market to come into your ecosystem.”“This is how monopolies work,” Mr. Hawley added. “You leverage market power in one market to get market power in another market — and it looks like you’re doing that in, frankly, multiple markets.”Ms. Klobuchar, who called the hearing, said in a summation that some of the problems in ticketing, such as fighting bot traffic, could be dealt with through legislation. But she said that the larger question, of whether to take action against Live Nation as a monopoly, was best handled by the Justice Department. The near-unanimous criticism from lawmakers on Tuesday may put pressure on the Justice Department to act.The most remarkable aspect of the hearing may have been the display of consensus by a panel often split along partisan lines. Mr. Blumenthal summed that up with a mocking salute to Mr. Berchtold.“I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement,” he said. “You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause.” More

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      Justin Peck’s New Americana, ‘Copland Dance Episodes’

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      “Right now you’re dancing on top of or ahead of the music,” Justin Peck told members of New York City Ballet during a recent rehearsal. As the pianist Craig Baldwin played the gently accumulating “Simple Gifts” section of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” Peck added: “Here, you should be riding the wave of the music. It’s like surfing on a longboard.”It wasn’t the only time Peck, City Ballet’s resident choreographer, spoke in metaphors while preparing “Copland Dance Episodes,” which premieres on Thursday at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. And it wasn’t the only time he encouraged dancers to match the plain-spoken spareness of the music. “It has to have the ease,” he said at one point, “of a tumbleweed blowing.”Peck, seated center, discussing “Copland Dance Episodes,” with his some of his creative team, clockwise from left Brandon Stirling Baker, Gonzalo Garcia, Craig Hall, Craig Salstein and Patricia Delgado.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThese dancers are somewhat familiar with Copland; Peck’s exhilaratingly athletic “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes,” from 2015, is one of his most beloved ballets. Yet the premiere on Thursday — an evening-length whirlwind that includes a version of his “Rodeo” but is also set to “Fanfare for the Common Man,” “Appalachian Spring” and “Billy the Kid” — will be a milestone on multiple fronts.To start, “Copland Dance Episodes” will be the company’s first evening-length, plotless work since George Balanchine’s “Jewels,” from 1967, and the first evening-length one for Peck, period; above all, for the artists involved, it will be the first time Copland’s three ballet scores, among the finest American music written in the genre, will be under City Ballet’s roof.“One of the things I noticed early on when I was making work at New York City Ballet is that there’s no Copland in the rep here,” Peck said in an interview. “That just felt like such a weird thing for this incredible American institution.”For his part, Andrew Litton, City Ballet’s music director, thrilled to be taking up the Copland scores. “It’s been an omission,” he said. “The saying was that he invented the sound of American music. He certainly invented the sound of the West, which has been copied by hundreds of film composers since.”Peck referred to Copland’s ballet output as “music that we all don’t realize we know, but we know”: the breakneck “Hoe-Down” from “Rodeo,” the symphonic elevation of “Simple Gifts” in “Appalachian Spring.”Peck demonstrates a move for his dancers. “It has to have the ease,” he said at one point in rehearsals, “of a tumbleweed blowing.”Jonathan Fahoury.“There’s a lot that can be culturally associated with it, especially the Western cowboy feel of it, which I’m not leaning into at all,” Peck added. “I was a little nervous about that at first, but had to sort of remind myself that this music was written by this Jewish gay guy from Brooklyn who had never been out West.”Several years before creating “Rodeo,” Peck saw Agnes de Mille’s original choreography at American Ballet Theater. He sat close to the orchestra, and although he enjoyed the dance, he was more struck by the score. “I could really feel it in a physical sense, rather than just using my ears and hearing it,” he said. “I kept thinking about the music, and then eventually, I had this thought that maybe there’s room for another interpretation.”Where de Mille’s dance is theatrical, Peck’s “Rodeo” is abstract, stripped down to a neutral scenic design and placeless costumes. In a playful turn, it’s also pronounced “ROH-dee-oh” instead of the traditional “roh-DAY-oh.” Jonathan Fahoury, a member of the corps de ballet said that Peck’s ballet is one of his favorites to perform, adding that it’s free of affect or ornament: “What you see is what you get.”Ashley Hod, left, and Christina Clark. “Copland Dance Episodes” builds on Peck’s “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes,” from 2015.“Rodeo,” Fahoury also said, is like a single idea that has now been expanded for “Copland Dance Episodes.” Peck used a similar comparison: “Making it was like making a pilot episode. That was proof of concept, and now what’s the rest of the season like? How do we take these character arcs even further through this abstract space, then tie it all up?”The works Peck is using, composed between 1938 and 1944, have had a standard-setting effect on American sound, with the incorporation of cowboy songs and folk music. And they exemplify what has been seen as a national style of straightforward modesty. Transparent and uncomplicated by dense counterpoint, Copland’s music from this time all but defies interpretation, and punishingly exposes players who deviate from its directions; the composer Ned Rorem once described it as having “never a note too many.”Onstage, the story ballets were distinct: “Billy the Kid” was written at the urging of Lincoln Kirstein for Ballet Caravan, a precursor to City Ballet; “Rodeo,” for de Mille; and “Appalachian Spring,” for Martha Graham. Yet they are, Peck said, “cut from the same cloth.”“Never a note too many”: Mckenzie Bernardino Soares, foreground, and fellow City Ballet dancers rehearse to Copland.That’s an argument borne out in the juxtapositions of “Copland Dance Episodes.” The opening “Fanfare” — as simple as can be, in the key of C and in common time — leads without friction into the brassy “Buckaroo Holiday” of “Rodeo,” which is in the same key, with the same number of beats per measure. Copland’s signature expansiveness, rendered with fifth intervals, opens the “Saturday Night Waltz” and returns later in “Billy the Kid.” And “Hoe-Down” ends with three emphatic sforzando notes that flow without a pause in Peck’s dance into three soft ones, in a logical key change, at the start of “Appalachian Spring.”Throughout, Litton said, the music remains at a “human” scale. That word has also often been applied to Peck’s choreography, particularly for groups. Another word that tends to come up when speaking with his City Ballet colleagues is “musical.”Litton described Peck’s relationship with the scores as “emotion based,” clearly responding to the notes with choreography that “always fits.” And Ellen Warren, a former dancer with the company who is designing the costumes for “Copland Dance Episodes,” said that seeing Peck at work “almost feels like a game between the movement and the music.”Peck, center, demonstrating to his dancers. Andrew Litton, City Ballet’s music director, described Peck’s relation to scores as “emotion-based.”Peck grew up playing piano, and continued with it while at the School of American Ballet. There, he took part in a music program led by Jeffrey Middleton. Eventually, Peck, who had long believed that dancers are musicians — especially tap dancers like Savion Glover — could interpret a score with confidence, and write piano works for himself.“Copland Dance Episodes” has been in development since soon after “Rodeo” premiered. After studying the scores and responding to them with movement, Peck mapped out the choreography as if it were a series. He said that the process of building it was closer to his work on Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” film than to his other ballets.“What I’m aiming to do is to get the viewer to break down the idea of, this is like a trilogy of some sort,” he said. “It’s not a trilogy. It’s sort of taking liberty by colliding all this music and immersing ourselves in the spell of it, and finding these pockets of interaction or of little anecdotes or of pure dance so that they can find the world of it in a new way.”The dancers in rehearsal. “It’s not a trilogy,” Peck said of “Copland Dance Episodes.” “It’s sort of taking liberty by colliding all this music and immersing ourselves in the spell of it.”Miriam Miller, a City Ballet soloist, said “Copland Dance Episodes” is “a nonnarrative ballet, but there are emotions and narrative within it.” There are couples who recur throughout, but the work, after the “Fanfare” introduction, begins with a version of Peck’s “Rodeo,” which was made for an ensemble of 15 male dancers (and one woman); and then, in “Appalachian Spring,” the casting is inverted, with a group of 15 female dancers on pointe. Near the end of that section, Peck said, the groups are combined “almost like peanut butter and jelly, then the third act, ‘Billy the Kid,’ brings these two worlds together and collides them.”This work is Peck’s 30th premiere with the lighting designer Brandon Stirling Baker, who said that in creating a scheme, he began with the music. “I listen for color,” he said. “And Aaron Copland is the most colorful composer you can think of. It can be many things — rowdy, epic, sensitive, serene.”Ultimately, he and Peck decided that the color should come from the score and the dancers, not from the light. “It’s going to all be light that we see in the real world,” Baker said. “It’s very honest, and the work can speak for itself. I thought about ‘Simple Gifts’: ‘’Tis a gift to be simple.’”Peck, left, with Aaron Sanz, said that the process of building “Copland Dance Episodes” was closer to his work on Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” film than to his other ballets.Much tone comes as well from the set, by the artist Jeffrey Gibson, whose work Peck saw in his exhibition “Like a Hammer” at the Denver Art Museum in 2018. Gibson’s style, which incorporates craft and camp in mixed media, with inspiration from his Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, is as fervently American as Copland’s music.“For me, listening to the music was a little complicated,” Gibson said. “It is Americana from a time of strife for Native American people.” But he and Peck also wanted their collaboration to put forward a vision for unity. Gibson arrived at a dizzyingly colorful curtain with text running along both sides that reads “the only way out is through” — “a set of words that expressed what a new Americana could be,” he said.The curtain’s look fed that of the costumes. Warren took the more than 100 colors of Gibson’s design and assigned two to each of the 30 dancers in the cast. During “Fanfare,” they are covered in white nylon tulle that Peck described as “the cobwebs of ballet’s past.”“He wants people to see the music in a new way,” Warren said. “They hear ‘Copland’ and they think Western. But the visuals are about dealing with the music in a way that’s truly rooted in America and our culture. All these colors are redefining what it means to be American.” More

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      Taylor Swift Fans Closely Watch Ticketmaster Senate Hearing

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      Ticketmaster expected to be grilled by senators during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on anticompetitive behavior in the ticketing industry. But also watching closely, and bringing their own heat, were Taylor Swift’s fans.“I think Swifties have figured something out,” Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, noted in his opening comments for Tuesday’s hearing, which was prompted by the fiasco surrounding Ticketmaster’s sales for Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour. “They’re very good at getting their message across.”Plans for fans to protest Ticketmaster outside the hearing — at least one of which was made by Jennifer Kinder, a lawyer representing fans in a lawsuit against Ticketmaster’s parent company — resulted in a small turnout on Capitol Hill.One of the plaintiffs in that lawsuit, Jenn Landry, said she took at last-minute flight from her home in Houston, Texas, to Washington, D.C., to attend the hearing, and that it had taken her husband eight hours to successfully buy tickets for the Eras tour.“I didn’t think it was right. It felt like the game was rigged,” Ms. Landry said. Her sign modified a lyric from Swift’s song “All Too Well” to reference the ticket debacle: “We remember your incompetence all too well.”Plenty more fans appeared to be streaming the hearing online, and a link to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s livestream of the proceedings was widely shared by fan social media accounts on Tuesday morning.“I’m having the time of my life right now, watching this courtroom stream,” said Erin Knox, a 21-year-old fan from New York State who, like many others, tweeted live reactions to the proceedings. “I have waited my entire fangirl-hood to see Ticketmaster get called out.”The fervor wasn’t exclusive to music fans. “As a Swiftie and antitrust policy nerd, this hearing is my Olympics,” Shira Stein, a Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, noted on Twitter.And several senators — or their staff members — appeared to have prepared Swift references for the fans they knew would be watching, including Senator Amy Klobuchar and the judiciary committee itself. It tweeted a Swift song title ahead of the hearing, asking: “…Ready for it?” More

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      Live Nation President Says Bot Attack Led to Taylor Swift Fiasco

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      Joe Berchtold, the president and chief financial officer of Live Nation Entertainment, used his testimony to dispute many of the central complaints that are commonly made against his company: that Live Nation does not face meaningful competition; that it squeezes too much money from venues and concertgoers, and that its size and dominance insulate it from the need to make technological innovations.In his testimony to the committee, Mr. Berchtold acknowledged problems with the Taylor Swift ticket sale. “In hindsight there are several things we could have done better,” he said. Mr. Berchtold argued that the biggest problem it faced with the Taylor Swift tour was an onslaught of bots that crowded out real fans and attacked Ticketmaster’s servers, forcing the company to pause its sales. “This is what led to a terrible consumer experience, which we deeply regret,” he said.Jerry Mickelson, chief executive officer of Jam Productions, responded to Mr. Berchtold’s assertion. “For the leading ticket company not to be able to handle bots is, for me, an unbelievable statement. You can’t blame bots for what happened to Taylor Swift, there’s more to that story that you’re not hearing,” he testified later. As to the larger questions of competition in the ticketing marketplace, Mr. Berchtold argued that it was greater than ever, and said that Ticketmaster had to fight to retain its business. While Ticketmaster had an estimated 80 percent of major concert venues at the time of its 2010 merger with Live Nation, the company has lost market share since then, Mr. Berchtold said. In the past, Live Nation has been accused — including by the Justice Department — of using the leverage of its control of concert tours to coerce venues to sign with Ticketmaster.“We hear people say that the ticketing markets are less competitive today than they were at the time of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger,” Mr. Berchtold said. “That’s simply not true.”  He pointed to SeatGeek, Eventbrite and other players in the field, as well as to a robust resale market.In his testimony, Mr. Berchtold rebutted complaints that Ticketmaster had failed to upgrade its systems by saying that the company had invested over $1 billion to improve its technology.He also suggested that the biggest problems facing ticketing, like bots and scalping, were best tackled by Congress itself. “There are problems in the ticketing industry — problems that we believe can and should be addressed through legislation,” Mr. Berchtold said. More