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      Phish Reschedules New Year’s Concerts at Madison Square Garden

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      The band moved its upcoming run of shows, a tradition at the arena, to April to avoid further spread of the coronavirus.The band Phish, which regularly plays New Year’s Eve concerts at Madison Square Garden, on Thursday postponed its upcoming run of shows, including a three-set performance originally planned for New Year’s Eve.“The health and safety of Phish fans, our crew and venue staff is paramount in our minds,” the band said in a statement. “While Phish has played shows this year as the pandemic has continued, this variant’s ability for rapid transmission is unprecedented.”The rescheduled shows will now take place April 20 to 23, with the three-set concert initially scheduled for New Year’s Eve moved to April 22.In its statement, Phish said that it wanted to “avoid accelerating transmission of the virus” because the group is aware that many people travel for shows like these, then return back to their communities. The band also acknowledged that “even with the strictest of tour Covid protocols,” a four-night indoor run would prolong exposure to crew and staff and increase the possibility of needing to shut down the shows.Ticket holders who can’t make the rescheduled show dates can request a refund any time in the next 30 days. Authorized ticket sellers like Ticketmaster and Phish Tickets will be contacting buyers with more information.On Wednesday, Cirque du Soleil also canceled its performances of “’Twas the Night Before” at Madison Square Garden from Wednesday through Friday because of breakthrough Covid cases in the production. (There are no shows on Saturday, but “’Twas the Night Before” is scheduled to resume on Sunday.)On Monday night, a Billy Joel concert at which all attendees were required to have at least one dose of a vaccine went ahead at the Garden. According to the concert’s listing on the venue’s website, masks were not required for fully vaccinated attendees.Two upcoming New York Knicks games on Wednesday and Saturday are still scheduled to take place. More

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      Cecilia McDowall to Debut New Christmas Carol

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      Each year, the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, commissions an original song for its Christmas service, giving the composer an audience of around 100 million people.LONDON — Every Christmas Eve, the British composer Cecilia McDowall follows the same routine.At 3 p.m., as family members arrive at her London home, she goes into the kitchen, turns on the radio and starts making a Christmas pudding — a slow-cooked, booze-soaked British dessert — while listening to the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, perform its Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.That service of Bible readings and Christmas music is one of Britain’s best known festive traditions, broadcast live on radio stations worldwide, including on around 450 in the United States. A spokesman for the choir estimated that 100 million listeners would tune in.But this year, McDowall won’t be in the kitchen. Instead, she will be sitting in King’s College’s huge Gothic chapel, listening as the choir performs “There Is No Rose,” a carol she has written especially for the event.Cecilia McDowall, a British composer, wrote a carol for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.Oxford University Press“It really is something significant,” McDowall said of the commission. “It must be the most people who’ve ever heard my music in one go.”Since the early 1980s, when the Choir of King’s College began ordering up new works for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, notable composers of religious music like John Tavener and Arvo Pärt have written for it, as well as more surprising names like Harrison Birtwistle, a British composer of spiky modernist pieces.King’s is far from alone in trying to bring new carols, or at least new settings of old texts, into the Christmas repertoire. McDowall said she had written 10 carols since the 1980s, starting with a piece for a school choir. This year, in addition to the King’s commission, she wrote a setting of “In Dulci Jubilo” for the choir of Wells Cathedral in southwest England.John Rutter, a prolific British composer of Christmas music, said in a telephone interview that this year he had also written two new carols: a setting of a William Blake poem for a cancer charity’s carol concert, and another for the Choir of Merton College, Oxford.Carol writing for choirs was a vibrant art form, Rutter said, adding that “no form of music can afford to be a museum where you’re only listening to the songs by the dead.” New works run the gamut from “something you might sing down the pub” to “refined and elegant compositions,” like McDowall’s, he added. Andrew Gant, the author of a book on a history of Christmas carols, said that some, like “The Holly and the Ivy,” are folk songs from before written records, but that many have surprisingly recent origins, far removed from the festive season. The music for “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” for instance, dates to 1840, when the German composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote the tune to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the printing press. Mendelssohn insisted the tune should never be used for religious purposes, Gant said, but 15 years later, William Cummings, a British organist, took the melody and added words from a Methodist hymn.The Choir of King’s College has commissioned a new work for its Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols since the early 1980s.Geoff RobinsonMany carols “are a series of happy accidents” like that, Gant said, adding that it was only in Victorian times that British composers started writing carols specifically for Christmas services.McDowall said the King’s College choir’s music director, Daniel Hyde, had requested that her piece provide “a moment of stillness” in the service, and asked her to keep it simple, in case choir members got sick at the last minute and new singers had to be brought in.Last December, the choir had a coronavirus outbreak in the run-up to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, then decided to cancel its live broadcast entirely as Britain was plunged into another lockdown.Hyde’s requests for an uncomplicated carol actually helped McDowall focus, she said, and the music came soon after she had found the words she wanted to use — a 15th-century hymn that tells the story of Jesus’s birth. McDowall said she had sung a setting of “There Is No Rose” by Benjamin Britten as a child and also admired a version by John Joubert. She submitted the piece in September.McDowall said she didn’t think of her carol competing against much-loved Christmas songs like “Once in Royal David’s City,” which opens the King’s service each year. “If any composer would be intimidated by the fact there exist other carols along the same lines, it’d just get in the way,” she said.Bob Chilcott, a co-editor of “Carols for Choirs” — a well-known compendium of Christmas music, first published in 1961 by Oxford University Press and updated regularly since — said there had “been a huge energy for writing new carols” in Britain over the past 20 years. Chilcott is in the process of selecting 50 new pieces for the next volume of “Carols for Choirs,” scheduled to be published in 2023. It might include contributions from contemporary composers like Caroline Shaw, he said.Most composers take one of two approaches, he said. The first is meditative, “maybe to do with talking about the quietness of the night, and the baby asleep in the manager.” The second is euphoric. “It’s all about the shepherd’s rejoicing and ‘Glory to God in the highest,’” he said. Most composers also try “to write a good tune,” Chilcott added.John Rutter, a British composer, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London this month. He has written several popular carols.Andy Paradise/Royal Philharmonic OrchestraRutter, who wrote a new carol for the King’s service in 1987, said his success with carols like the “Shepherd’s Pipe Carol” and “What Sweeter Music” — both sung in churches throughout the English-speaking world — was down to their memorable melodies, which seemed like they had been around for hundreds of years. He was “50 percent composer, and 50 percent songwriter,” he said.Hyde said McDowall’s “There Is No Rose” was centered on “a beautiful cluster” of notes that “hover, like a freeze frame,” before unfurling into a tune. “The last thing you’ll hear is the original cluster we started with, echoing in the space,” he added. “I hope people will be moved by it.”But McDowall didn’t want to say any more than Hyde. The choir likes to keep the details under wraps, and doesn’t let any recordings of the piece emerge until after it has been broadcast — by which time McDowall should be heading home to a waiting Christmas pudding. More

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      In Washington, a Princess Party and a Carnival of Self-Loathing

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      Two shows with Broadway aspirations, “Once Upon a One More Time” and “A Strange Loop,” represent opposite extremes of what a big, mainstream production can be.WASHINGTON — Sidney Harman Hall was bustling before a recent matinee of “Once Upon a One More Time,” a revisionist fairy tale mash-up scored with Britney Spears songs at Shakespeare Theater Company here. People were taking group selfies at one of two step-and-repeats. A few girls — and women — tittered in tiaras. Purple T-shirts and tote bags with the show’s title and the names of storybook princesses were being sold. And the theater, which has a capacity of about 700, had no empty seats in sight. At least from the outside, “Once Upon a One More Time” looked like the kind of splashy show you might find on Broadway.I was in Washington for the weekend, at the first post-opening matinee of the show, and it wasn’t the only musical in the neighborhood with Broadway aspirations; the second show I saw here, Woolly Mammoth’s production of “A Strange Loop,” by Michael R. Jackson, has just announced plans for a Broadway run in the spring. It’s a more daring work: a meta show about a queer Black playwright writing a show about a queer Black playwright that opened Off Broadway in 2019 and won the Pulitzer Prize.Two very different shows in two very different theaters less than a mile apart: “Once Upon a One More Time” and “A Strange Loop” represent opposite extremes of what a Broadway production can be.Written by Jon Hartmere and directed and choreographed by the husband-and-wife team Keone and Mari Madrid, “Once Upon a One More Time” is set inside an abstract representation of the world of children’s storybooks. That’s to say that whenever a child opens a book of fairy tales, the denizens of this magical kingdom must act out the classic plots for the reader. Meanwhile, the princes and princesses — Snow White (Aisha Jackson), the Little Mermaid (Lauren Zakrin), Sleeping Beauty (Ashley Chiu), the Princess and the Pea (Morgan Weed), Rapunzel (Wonu Ogunfowora) and several others — hang around like on-call workers, waiting for their boss, the Narrator, to direct them through the scenes of their tales, which they must obediently act out in order to have their happily ever after.Princesses take a stand: From left, Lauren Zakrin, Selene Haro, Ashley Chiu, Adrianna Weir (seated), Wonu Ogunfowora, Aisha Jackson, Jennifer Florentino and Amy Hillner Larsen.Mathew MurphyBut Cinderella (Briga Heelan) isn’t happy, and becomes even less so after she learns that her Prince Charming (Justin Guarini) is being paid for his services while she isn’t. Then Cinderella meets the Notorious O.F.G. (that’s Original Fairy Godmother, comically played by Brooke Dillman), who comes all the way from the mystical land of Flatbush, Brooklyn, to give poor Cin a copy of “The Feminine Mystique.” Suddenly enlightened by feminist theory, Cinderella leads her fellow princesses in protest, demanding that they be allowed to write their own stories.The audience cheered at the more clever pairings of popular Spears songs with important plot points, like an unfaithful prince singing “Oops! … I Did It Again” or Cinderella’s evil stepmother singing “Toxic.”But as I watched the show, I wondered: Who is the target audience for this? So many Broadway shows are aimed at a general audience, and similarly, “Once Upon a One More Time” seems to want to appeal to both children and adults. The fairy tale premise (nodding to shows like “Into the Woods” and “Shrek”) and the earnest sermonizing seem to point to an audience of kids. But the lines of dialogue about microaggressions (the Narrator warns Cinderella about being “difficult,” getting “hysterical” and using a “shrill” voice, all of which made the audience gasp), along with some mild sex jokes, are clearly aimed at knowing adults. Plus, call me conventional, but I doubt a children’s show would include a song called “Work Bitch.” In aiming for a Broadway stage, “Once Upon a One More Time” still seems to be figuring out what its prospective audience would look like.With its blatant messaging about female empowerment and revisionist approach, not unlike two recent Broadway musicals — “Six” and “Diana,” both of which recast famous women from history as self-possessed and self-reliant feminist icons — “Once Upon a One More Time” reflects the broad strokes of modern-day feminism but shies away from anything too hefty or complex. That includes the pink-pigtailed elephant in the room: Spears herself, who has documented what she has called years of exploitation in her quest to end her conservatorship. So particularly the Britney faithful will most likely be disappointed to find the pop star absent from a show largely based on the products of her career.“A Strange Loop” has announced plans to transfer to Broadway in the spring. From left: James Jackson Jr., L Morgan Lee, Antwayn Hopper, John-Andrew Morrison, Jaquel Spivey (seated right), Jason Veasey and John-Michael Lyles.Marc J. FranklinAt Woolly Mammoth’s space, just a few blocks from Sidney Harman Hall, there were no selfie stations or gift kiosks. The theater seats less than 300 people, and the content of Jackson’s “A Strange Loop” could not be more different from “Once Upon a One More Time.”Directed by Stephen Brackett, “A Strange Loop” is a carnival of its protagonist’s self-loathing, his insecurities, his introspective reveries on sexuality and identity, society, family and religion. It’s hilarious until it turns vicious, and vice versa. And it defines itself through a critique of commercial productions, like the long-running Broadway show “The Lion King,” as well as through a deconstruction of the expectations society may have of a Black, queer artist, which can crush brave new work.The musical rejects the polite, family-friendly themes and the tidy endings of what its protagonist, a Broadway usher named Usher (Jaquel Spivey), sees at work. Full of references to sexual assault and racism, and with enough offensive language to fill a gallon-size swear jar, “A Strange Loop” aims to bring taboo topics to mainstream theater. The Woolly Mammoth crowd snapped and mmhmm-ed to lines breaking down queer and race politics; at one point a man in the row behind me got out of his seat and waved his arms around to the music as if he were at a rave — if raves played devastating songs about homophobia and abuse.Walking out of the theater afterward, I overheard a group of friends wonder if “A Strange Loop” could go to Broadway. One woman had reservations; she liked it, she said, but — and here she paused before awkwardly stumbling through her qualifier — it was a musical about AIDS.I held my tongue — because I could’ve mentioned that “Rent” and “Angels in America” were two Broadway shows about AIDS. Or that “A Strange Loop” is about so much more than AIDS. Or that this season, Broadway had “Dana H.,” a show about kidnapping and assault, and “Is This a Room,” about a real F.B.I. investigation — both fantastic, critically acclaimed works of art. Or that “Slave Play” brought similarly explicit language and sexual content to Broadway in 2019 and has now reopened.Or I could’ve simply said that this beautifully brutal work of theater is already headed to Broadway. More

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      Steve Bronski, of Pioneering Gay Band Bronski Beat, Dies at 61

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      He was part of a British trio whose songs often directly addressed gay themes and issues in a way few other pop music acts were doing.Steve Bronski, part of the 1980s British synth-pop trio Bronski Beat, whose members were openly gay at a time when that was uncommon and whose early songs unabashedly addressed homophobia and other gay issues, died after a fire on Dec. 7 at his apartment building in the Soho section of London, British news outlets reported. He was 61.The London Fire Brigade confirmed that it had responded to a fire on Berwick Street and taken an unidentified man to a hospital, where he later died. Josephine Samuel, a friend who had been helping to care for Mr. Bronski since he’d had a stroke several years ago, told The Guardian that Mr. Bronski was the fire victim.Mr. Bronski formed Bronski Beat in 1983 with Jimmy Somerville and Larry Steinbachek, and their first single, “Smalltown Boy,” was released the next year. It was a stark story of a young gay man’s escape from a provincial town where he had endured a homophobic attack; a haunting chorus repeats, “Run away, turn away.” The official video for the song, fleshing out the events the lyrics allude to, has been viewed more than 68 million times on YouTube.The song became a Top 5 hit in Britain and made the charts in other countries as well, including the United States. A follow-up, “Why?,” another chart success, was equally direct, the lyrics speaking to the ostracism and social disapproval experienced by gay people. “You in your false securities tear up my life, condemning me,” one lyric goes. “Name me an illness, call me a sin. Never feel guilty, never give in.”At the time, a number of mainstream performers — Elton John, the Village People, Boy George — telegraphed gayness, often with stereotypical flamboyance, but rarely addressed gay issues directly in song. Bronski Beat was different, eschewing coyness and gimmicks.“They buck stereotypes,” Jim Farber wrote in The Daily News in 1985, “presenting themselves as everyday Joes.”The group’s debut album, “The Age of Consent” (1984), was as forthright as the two singles. The album sleeve listed the “minimum age for lawful homosexual relationships between men” in European countries, an effort to underscore that the age in the United Kingdom at the time, 21, was higher than almost everywhere else. The sleeve also included a phone number for a gay legal advice line.Mr. Bronski said the trio didn’t start out as a political or social statement.“We were just writing songs that spoke about our lives at the time,” he told Gay Times in 2018. “We had no idea ‘Smalltown Boy’ would resonate with so many people.”But when they began doing live performances in 1983, he told The Associated Press in 1986, the audience reaction helped them realize that they had struck a chord.“We had all these people coming backstage saying, ‘I think it’s great you’ve been so honest about it,’” he said.That same audience reaction landed them a contract with London Records in early 1984. Mr. Bronski was on keyboards and synthesizers along with Mr. Steinbachek; Mr. Somerville’s distinctive falsetto vocals were the group’s signature.Warren Whaley, an electronic music composer based in Los Angeles and half of the synth-pop duo the Dollhouse, struck up a running correspondence with Mr. Bronski when he wrote to him after Mr. Steinbachek’s death in 2016.“I recall hearing their debut single, ‘Smalltown Boy,’ on the alternative music radio station in Los Angeles in 1984,” Mr. Whaley said by email. “The song starts with a heavy octave bass. Then a staccato hook. Then Jimmy Somerville’s lovely falsetto. I was hooked by 22 seconds in. This band was something special. Something new — but old. Their sound harkened to disco and R&B. But it sounded new, different.”Mr. Bronski in 1996. He continued to make music after the original Bronski Beat trio broke up. Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesThe original Bronski Beat lineup didn’t last long; Mr. Somerville left the group in 1985. But Mr. Bronski continued to make music, with Mr. Steinbachek for a time and with others over the years, most notably “Hit That Perfect Beat,” a hit in Britain and elsewhere in 1986 and a dancehall favorite ever since. Mr. Whaley said that though Bronski Beat’s best-known songs had gay-centric lyrics, “their appeal crossed the boundaries of sexual alignment.”“Everyone bopped their heads and danced to their music,” he said.Mr. Bronski was born Steven Forrest on Feb. 7, 1960, in Glasgow. He had made his way to London by the early 1980s, where he met Mr. Somerville and Mr. Steinbachek.“It was a lot easier living in London,” he told Classic Pop magazine in 2019, explaining why he and other gay men had gravitated to the city, “since there was a thriving gay scene compared to other parts of the country.”Information on his survivors was not available.In 2017, more than three decades after the release of “The Age of Consent,” the only album with the original Bronski Beat lineup, Mr. Bronski teamed with Stephen Granville and Ian Donaldson to release the album “The Age of Reason” under the Bronski Beat name, revisiting songs from the original record and adding new tracks.“I think a lot of the songs are as relevant today as they were all those years ago,” he told Gay Times. More

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      How Hillary Clinton's MasterClass Shows a Very 2021 Way to Be

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      Hillary Clinton delivered an unused election speech. Jennifer Aniston cried at Central Perk. It was a year for watching celebrities reinhabit their past selves.MasterClass, an online platform where you can watch famous people deliver video tutorials for $180 a year, recently debuted a course on the topic of resilience. It begins with a close-up shot of a weathered oval desk. We hear papers shuffling, birds chirping, the voices of an ethereal choir. A woman’s hands drift across a policy document. As white light flares through a garden window, Hillary Clinton appears. She wears a serene smile and a magenta blouse. It feels like she’s back from the dead.Clinton’s 16 video lessons in resilience are largely tedious (one is about binder organization), but the whole exercise builds to a rattling unease. The course culminates with Clinton reciting her unused presidential victory speech from 2016. Holding the text in her lap like a storybook, she seems to be impersonating a lost version of herself. She is accessing a faintly smug, terribly naïve Hillary Clinton, as if practicing in front of a mirror for a moment that would never arrive. It’s the kind of humiliating growth exercise you might spy through the keyhole of a therapist’s office. Even as Clinton has styled herself as an influencer on the subject of carrying on, it feels as if she is being held hostage by the past, compelled to relive her defeat again and again.This is, actually, a very 2021 way to be. Popular culture is saturated with famous figures playing their past selves, revisiting old haunts and resurrecting buried personal histories. This year, Taylor Swift began releasing note-for-note re-recordings of her early albums in a bid to reclaim control of her catalog after her adversary Scooter Braun assumed ownership of her masters and sold them to an investment fund. The cast of “Friends” reunited in an eerie replica of Central Perk, while the original “Real World” roommates returned to the Manhattan loft they shared in 1992. And celebrities have flooded TikTok, groveling to fans with corny re-enactments: Ryan Reynolds poorly lip-syncs a bit from his 2005 rom-com “Just Friends,” while Zooey Deschanel eagerly replicates her song and dance from the “New Girl” opening credits.I thought we had reached peak pop culture nostalgia a decade ago, when an endless buffet of 1990s-kid ephemera was rewarmed for digital consumption and a sepia Instagram filter could convert last night’s party photos into an instant retrospective. But there is something unexpectedly charged about this development, which invites us to watch a person squeeze back into her old skin. The literalness of the exercise emphasizes the slipperiness of time, shining a garish spotlight on mortality and lending a tragic depth to the most venal of reunion specials. Even the cringey TikToks have a measure of profundity, as aging celebrities play their younger selves to appeal to even younger audiences, all set on a perpetual loop.The imperative of the streaming boom is to turn the content spigot to full blast, but that makes content seem forgettable and cheap. So now producers are resurrecting properties from when content was scarce enough to feel precious, and inviting us to watch as the associated celebrities reinfuse them with their auras. Like the doomed characters on “Lost,” who manage to escape their spooky island only to feel compelled to return, the financial pull of existing I.P. is often too strong for famous people to resist. These re-enactments and self-impersonations represent the latest turn in the entertainment industry’s rapacious churn, as it mines psychodrama from the very process of rebooting culture.On “Real World: Homecoming,” the original roommates returned to the Manhattan loft they shared in 1992.Danielle Levitt/MTVIt all reminds me of a different kind of re-enactment: this year’s documentary “Procession,” which concerns six men who survived child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. With the help of a drama therapist and the documentarian Robert Greene, they revisit the scenes of the crimes, act out fictionalized versions of their memories and film them. One of the men recreates a priest’s quarters, paints it all white, then destroys it with a sledgehammer; another hunts down a priest’s old lake house and walks the overgrown path that led to his rape. Their hope is that by physicalizing these traumatic incidents, they can reinscribe their memories and dispel their power.These Hollywood re-enactments also have a sheen of exposure therapy, conjuring old dramas through sense memory. “Friends: The Reunion,” on HBO Max, emphasizes the production’s precise rebuilding of sets, and as soon as Jennifer Aniston crosses the threshold of the replicated apartment of her character, Rachel Green, tears are in her eyes. Later, she would say that she was so walloped by memories — the end of “Friends” overlapped with the dissolution of her marriage to Brad Pitt — that she paused filming to pull herself together. Aniston’s tabloid persona is haunted by her past romantic lives, and the scenario felt designed to rouse dormant narratives. Part of the lurid appeal of the reunion is watching the lightly debasing spectacle of the cast assembling around a table to re-enact old scripts, as if in a celebrity support group for exorcising classic roles. Of course, the actual purpose is to prime viewers to revisit their own ’90s memories, via “Friends” episodes, which are now exclusively streaming on HBO Max.On “The Real World: Homecoming,” on Paramount+, the frisson of the reunion springs from their reoccupation of the loft they shared nearly 30 years ago. The housemates have hardly popped a bottle of prosecco when a tense 1992 argument about racism between Becky, a white songwriter, and Kevin, a Black activist, is replayed for the group. The cast seems prepared to calmly reprocess this exchange with the exception of Becky (now an alternative healer who goes by Rebecca), who instantly springs back to her familiar defensive posture, protesting that she “lost” her “skin color” through her experience dancing with a multiethnic troupe. So strong is the psychological pull of this place, she becomes convinced that she was actively set up as the scapegoat for white privilege, and she scurries from the loft for good.This messy display stands in contrast to Taylor Swift’s tightly controlled nostalgic exercise. Her re-recordings are deliberately unrevealing — she sounds as if she is performing uncanny self-karaoke — but the story she has spun around them is captivating. In April, she released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2008 album. On it, we hear a 31-year-old woman impersonating her 19-year-old self reflecting on her 15-year-old self, and doing it all to smite the men who hoped to seize control of her songs.Part of the lurid appeal of “Friends: The Reunion” is watching the spectacle of the cast (including Jennifer Aniston) re-enacting old scripts, as if in a celebrity support group for exorcising their classic roles.HBO MaxFor a time, the most indelible cultural artifact of this moment was a parenthetical bit of metadata, “(Taylor’s Version),” which Swift appended to the titles of her newly recorded songs, and which became a meme anyone could use to signal a prideful ownership of their own cultural outputs, no matter how slight. But in November, Swift’s immersion in her past built to a breakthrough, as she released a 10-minute extension of her beloved 2012 breakup song “All Too Well.” With the new version, she interpolates the wistful original with starkly drawn scenes that play almost like recovered memories, recasting a romance as a site of trauma that so reduced her that she compares herself to “a soldier who’s returning half her weight.”Nostalgia is derived from the Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain,” and before it referred to a yearning for the past, it was a psychopathological disorder, describing a homesickness so severe it could actually kill. Nostalgia itself represented a form of traumatic stress, and now pseudo-therapeutic treatments have made their way into our cultural retrospectives. So while Serena Williams appears on MasterClass to teach tennis, and Ringo Starr to teach drumming, Clinton arrives to school us on “the power of resilience.”Resilience suggests elasticity, and there is something morbidly fascinating about watching Clinton revert to her pre-Trump form. The victory speech itself reads like centrist Mad Libs — a meditation on “E Pluribus Unum,” nods to both Black Lives Matter and the bravery of police, an Abraham Lincoln quote — but at its end it veers into complex emotional territory. Clinton recalls her mother, Dorothy Rodham, who died in 2011, and as she describes a dream about her, her voice shakes and warps in pitch. Dorothy Rodham had a bleak upbringing, and Clinton wishes she could visit her mother’s childhood self and assure her that despite all the suffering she would endure, her daughter would go on to become the president of the United States.As Clinton plays her former self comforting her mother’s former self with the idea of a future Clinton who will never exist, we finally glimpse a loss that cannot be negotiated, optimized or monetized: She can never speak to her mother again. Soon, Clinton’s MasterClass has reverted back to its banal messaging — she instructs us to dust ourselves off, take a walk, make our beds —  but for a few seconds, she could be seen not as a windup historical figure but as a person, like the rest of us, who cannot beat time. More

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      A ‘Nutcracker’ Performance Is Canceled, as the Virus Halts Holiday Shows

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      New York City Ballet canceled Tuesday night’s performance, and a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall was called off.New York City Ballet canceled a performance of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” on Tuesday after several people involved in the production tested positive for the coronavirus, in the latest sign of how the surge in cases is disrupting attempts to bring back some of the city’s most beloved holiday performances.As the production, one of City Ballet’s most popular, was called off at Lincoln Center, plans to fill Carnegie Hall on Tuesday evening with the “Hallelujah” chorus were canceled when Music Sacra postponed a performance of Handel’s “Messiah,” citing the virus. And there are no more holiday kicklines at Radio City Music Hall: The remaining performances of the “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes” were canceled Friday.The cancellations came shortly after it was announced that some of Broadway’s biggest hits would not resume until after Christmas, forgoing one of their most lucrative periods of the year amid concerns about the spread of the Omicron variant.It was not immediately clear when performances of “The Nutcracker” would return.“We are very disappointed to have to cancel this evening’s performance,” Jonathan Stafford, the company’s artistic director, said in a statement, “but the safety of our artists, staff and audiences has been New York City Ballet’s No. 1 priority since the Covid-19 pandemic began.”The company has worked hard to bring back the holiday favorite under difficult circumstances. It turned to a cast of dancers 12 and older — it typically casts younger, smaller children as its angels, soldiers and mice, and for its party scene — since only children of those ages were eligible for vaccinations when rehearsals began in the fall.The company said that ticket holders could exchange tickets for a future performance, get refunds or donate the tickets to the company. Music Sacra, which postponed its Tuesday night performance because of positive coronavirus tests among members of its performing ensemble, said that it would perform later this season at Carnegie Hall.It is not only New York that is seeing holiday performances canceled. A number of performances of “A Christmas Carol” at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles were recently canceled, with the theater saying that it would not come back until after Christmas. More

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      These Carol Singers Are Carrying on, Despite Omicron Variant

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      Last year, most carol singing in Britain was canceled because of the pandemic. This year, a group of roving singers was determined to carry on, despite the Omicron variant.LONDON — Last Thursday night, many people in Britain were worrying about the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, and whether the pandemic was about to disrupt Christmas plans for the second year in a row.The country had just broken a record for new daily cases of the virus and Prime Minister Boris Johnson had urged the public to “think carefully” before going to Christmas parties.But for three carol singers standing outside Leadbelly’s, a bar in south London, there was a more immediate problem: a lack of tenors.Zoë Bonner, 41, a soprano and co-organizer of a caroling pub crawl to raise money for a homeless charity, explained that a scarcity of male voices “was always” an issue for choirs and carol singers.Then Peter Coleman, 24, strode across the square in front of the bar toward the group. “Houston, we have a man!” he said, introducing himself.Within a few minutes, the four singers began belting out an intricately harmonized rendition of “Deck the Halls” into the London night. When they hit the chorus, a group of nearby drinkers pushed themselves out of their chairs to see what on earth was going on.In Britain, the tradition of caroling dates to at least Victorian times and is mentioned in Charles Dickens’s novels.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesSince the coronavirus pandemic hit last year, live singing has been arguably the most demonized of cultural activities, after it was linked to several superspreader events. An infected singer, projecting their voice across a poorly ventilated space, can quickly spread virus particles.Last Christmas, caroling — when singers perform door to door, or pub to pub, a tradition that dates in Britain to at least Victorian times and is mentioned in Charles Dickens’s novels — stopped in much of Britain after government guidance for the holiday season said singers should consider canceling events, even outdoors. Many carol services in the country’s churches and cathedrals also came to a halt.This winter, it seemed attitudes had changed, at least among British lawmakers. On Dec. 8, when Boris Johnson announced that masks would become compulsory again in most indoor public spaces in England, in response to the Omicron variant, he said that singers were exempt. (A government spokesman later clarified that this didn’t mean people could sing while shopping and avoid wearing a mask in grocery stores.)At Thursday’s caroling pub crawl, Meg McClure, the event’s other organizer, said she realized that the event carried a risk — it felt a bit like “caroling on the edge.” But every singer had done a rapid antigen test before attending, she said, and the group had decided to perform outside if any of the pubs they visited were too busy.Also, she said, there was a chance the singers would only be caroling to a handful of people, since many Londoners were deciding to stay home. “I called all the pubs earlier to make sure we could come,” McClure said. “One actually said to me, ‘I’m not sure we’re going to have anyone in, love — but you’re welcome to visit.’”The evening felt a bit like “caroling on the edge,” one caroler said, although each singer had done a rapid antigen test before attending.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesWhen the group arrived at its first stop — The Salt Quay, a gastro pub overlooking the River Thames — it looked like that prediction might come true. The vast space contained only 11 drinkers, including three young men watching soccer on their phones. The group sang three carols, peaking with an uproarious “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” to polite applause, but few donations.At the next pub, The Brunel, it seemed things might be even worse. When the carolers arrived, the quaint venue had only five customers, two of them visibly drunk. But as soon as the group started singing — now boosted by another male singer, who had arrived late — they grabbed their audience’s attention.One of the pub’s patron’s, George Parrin, 77, pantomimed a heart attack when the voices soared. “Listen to these harmonies!” he shouted to a friend. The friend shushed him back.Two women moved close to the singers and swayed to the music, and several passers-by walked in looking surprised but happy to see the group. Spare coins and bills were soon landing in red collection tins.Molly Thomson, 26, said she had originally planned to go to a concert by the rapper Little Simz, but had decided not to go, because she was worried about catching the virus. “So this is amazing,” she said. “It’s the next best thing.”Outside The Mayflower pub, the eight-strong carol group sang a raucous “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and the haunting “Coventry Carol.”Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesFor the professional singers in the group, like Bonner, the last few weeks had been some of the busiest since the pandemic began. This month, she had performed in 12 carol services and concerts, and had a regular gig singing Christmas music while afternoon tea was served at an expensive London hotel. After a year of struggling to make a living, those jobs couldn’t have been more welcome, she said, though she feared new public health restrictions could soon make the work dry up again.After a couple of hours, the roving chorus reached the final pub: The Mayflower, named after the ship that in 1620 took Pilgrims to what is now the United States. The group was now eight members strong — including four men. They stood on the pub’s terrace, looking out onto the Thames, and sang a raucous “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and the haunting “Coventry Carol.”When they came to “Silent Night,” one of the onlookers, Clare Phillips, 32, turned to a friend and said, “This was my grandmother’s favorite carol,” then pulled her close for a hug.Afterward, the carolers gave one final performance on the cobbled streets outside the pub. People came to the windows of nearby apartments to listen, and customers drinking outside grabbed their phones to record the performance. A few even dared to join in.Helen Birkenshaw, a digital producer in her 40s, was one of those rapt by the singing. “These people just appeared out of nowhere,” she said. “It was like a little Christmas magic.” More

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      Two Pianists, Two Recitals, Two Deeply Personal Statements

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      Sara Davis Buechner and Conrad Tao both appeared in New York on Saturday.Before Franz Liszt, it was rare for pianists to do solo programs. But when Liszt was preparing to perform in London in 1840, an advertisement said that he would give “recitals on the pianoforte.”The word confused many. How do you “recite” a piano piece? But Liszt had chosen deliberately: His recitals would offer not just an arbitrary mixture of scores but also, as with literary readings, a program with larger thematic threads, musical resonances and even personal significance.His idea certainly caught on. Yet too many recitals today fall far short of the Lisztian ideal; they come across as just a string of performances of this and that.But on Saturday, not one but two adventurous pianists gave recitals that harkened back to the form’s origins, drawing out musical, social and deeply personal connections. In the afternoon, at Theaterlab, an intimate space for experimental fare in Manhattan, Sara Davis Buechner presented “Of Pigs and Pianos,” an 80-minute performance in which she played while relating the story of her often grueling but finally triumphant gender transition. In the evening, at the 92nd Street Y, Conrad Tao juxtaposed major works by Schumann and Beethoven with more recent scores by John Adams, Jason Eckardt and Fred Hersch, along with the premiere of an intense new piece by Tao and several improvisations.Improvisation “kept me in my life” during the pandemic, Conrad Tao told his audience at the 92nd Street Y.Joseph SinnottThough it had theatrical trappings — a simple set and projections of photographs — at its core, “Of Pigs and Pianos” was a recital, offering fine performances of nine varied and challenging works that poignantly defined moments in the journey of a courageous artist, now 62. Buechner’s story, though often wrenching, was rich with childhood fantasies, wistful longings and absurd turns that had the audience laughing along.The title, “Of Pigs and Pianos,” comes from her early years, when she was asked by her first piano teacher what she wanted to be when she grew up. “A pig farmer and a piano player,” Buechner answered.Buechner was born in the Chinese year of the pig, she said, adding that perhaps the way pigs dug in the mud prefigured her penchant as an adult pianist to champion overlooked repertory, including works by Turina, Busoni, Moszkowski and even the forgotten piano pieces of the operetta composer Rudolf Friml.She accompanied endearing stories of her childhood with elegant performances of Haydn and Mozart. Once, visiting a museum with her mother, Buechner was enthralled by a Rubens painting of a beautiful young noblewoman. “I’m going to look like her,” she told her mother, who promptly dragged her to an arms and armor exhibition.Buechner was unsparing in her description of becoming the “punching bag” at her elementary school, abuse that became so extreme that she was sent to a Quaker school. There she fell in love for the first time; Buechner said she wonders whether she was actually in love with this splendid young woman or she secretly wanted to be her.Music and piano became Buechner’s outlet — where she could be what she called her “true self.” As if to demonstrate, at the recital on Saturday she gave an exciting account of the teeming (and very difficult) first movement of Chopin’s Third Sonata. After tossing off the final chords, she proudly shouted: “I played that at my Juilliard audition! I was 16!”Indeed, Buechner had early success after success, including winning top prizes at major competitions and extensive tours. All the while, though, she struggled with her gender identity. On Saturday she shared stories of developing ulcers and contemplating suicide, and had the audience grimly laughing at her accounts of sessions with a series of hopeless psychiatrists.“Therapists are like piano teachers,” she said. “There are lots of them, and they are mostly bad.”Finally, in the late 1990s, Buechner began her transition to her true self, which included a botched surgery in Bangkok that later had to be corrected. In the process she lost friends, family, her manager and concert dates; her letters seeking teaching jobs were not even answered.Eventually she found her way to a new, more welcoming life teaching at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. From that point on, slowly and steadily, her international career was reborn. Today she teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia; the text for “Of Pigs and Pianos” comes from an autobiography she has written and hopes to have published. She ended the program with a melting rendition of a wistful Scarlatti sonata, which conveyed the place of satisfaction and peace at which she has arrived.In the evening, at the Y, speaking to the audience, Tao, 27, said that during the hard, lonely months of the pandemic, improvisation had become increasingly crucial to him, allowing him an immediate “response to an environment” — it “kept me in my life.”His recitals in recent years have been his own brand of Lisztian statements, like “American Rage,” a program (and a 2019 recording) of flinty works by Rzewski, Julia Wolfe and Copland, which Tao assembled, as a son of immigrant parents, to protest the hostility toward immigration and outsiders that was roiling America. Tao, who is gay, has pointedly played Copland’s steely piano works to reclaim this “gay, Commie Jew,” as he described Copland in an interview, from the perception that his music is solely about nostalgic Americana.He opened his program on Saturday by seguing from his own mercurial, rippling improvisation into Adams’s kaleidoscopic “China Gates.” An impish Eckardt piece led into a reflective Bach chorale prelude. Then another restless Tao improvisation set up a superb performance of Schumann’s “Kinderszenen,” followed, after intermission, by Fred Hersch’s “Pastorale” in homage to Schumann and Tao’s pummeling, thrilling “Keyed In.” A stirring and sensitive account of Beethoven’s late Sonata No. 31 ended the recital magnificently.As an encore, in honor of another composer Tao reveres, he played his own arrangement of “Sunday” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.” Of all the tributes Sondheim has garnered since his death, none has moved me more. More