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      Two New York Orchestras Return With Acts of Renewal

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      Classical music’s live performance comeback continued with concerts by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.How should classical music ensembles return to live performance after 18 months of pandemic closures and a nationwide reckoning with racial injustice?It’s a question that has loomed as programmers decide whether to open their seasons with statements of purpose. Recently, two major New York groups — the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra — returned with what appeared to be mostly standard fare that could come across as timid missed opportunities, yet offered exceptionally fine and committed music-making that felt like acts of renewal.At Carnegie Hall last Thursday, Bernard Labadie, the music director of St. Luke’s since 2018, warmly greeted the audience and explained that when he and the players started planning their program, “one word jumped out: joy.” This concert was all about having some fun, he added, and Handel’s “Water Music” is “the happiest music I know.”He led the orchestra in a lively, stylish account of the complete “Water Music,” 22 pieces lasting some 50 minutes. Handel wrote this score to provide entertainment for King George I and his entourage during a river trip in 1717 from Whitehall Palace in London to the borough of Chelsea. “Water Music” is best known for the various suites drawn from it — which, for me, more effectively show off the allures of the music and the rich intricacies Handel subtly folded into each piece. But, judging by their enthusiastic ovation, the audience seemed happy to go along for the entirety of Handel’s musical river ride.This Baroque program began with a vigorous account of the Prelude from Charpentier’s “Te Deum,” music that deftly mixes martial-like rigor and sparkling ebullience. Next came a Bach novelty, a “weird creature of my imagination,” as Labadie described it, titled “An imaginary Concerto for Violin.” During his busy years in Leipzig, Germany, Bach often recycled existing movements from instrumental pieces into large sacred scores, Labadie explained. So, with respect and plucky daring, Labadie fashioned a concerto from three Bach movements that feature a solo violin: two sinfonias sandwiching an adagio from the “Easter Oratorio.” The result was a sort-of concerto, with an industrious first movement, a mournful slow one and a fleet finale, made to order for the splendid violinist Benjamin Bowman, who played beautifully.The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra began its season with works by Mozart and Boulogne at the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday.Joe SinnottAt the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday, two Mozart staples dominated the program by Orpheus, which in 2022 celebrates its 50th anniversary as a proudly conductor-less ensemble. (The evening was also the start of the venue’s classical music season.) Opening the concert was a short work by the 18th-century composer and violinist Joseph Boulogne, whose life and musical achievements have been gaining renewed attention. The ensemble gave a vibrant account of the beguiling, three-movement Overture to “L’Amant Anonyme,” Boulogne’s only surviving opera.Then the distinguished pianist Richard Goode, who has collaborated with Orpheus since the mid-1970s, including recordings of Mozart concertos, appeared as the soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C, a majestic and virtuosic score. Goode was at his best, in a sensitive, crisply clear and supremely musical performance. The orchestra ended with an exciting account of Mozart’s “Linz” Symphony. With just 25 players in the Y’s intimate hall, the music came across grandly, but also with revealing detail.I wish someone from Orpheus had spoken, as Labadie had for St. Luke’s, about the ensemble’s reasons for choosing the works it had for this significant return. There were not even program notes available. Some artists prefer to let music speak for itself. But maybe this is a time when classical musicians need to speak directly about what they are playing, and why. More

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      R. Kelly to Face Another Trial in Chicago, Next August

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      The R&B star was convicted last month in Brooklyn of sex trafficking and racketeering charges after decades of sexual abuse allegations.R. Kelly, the R&B superstar who was convicted last month in Brooklyn on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges, has been scheduled to stand trial again starting on Aug. 1 in Chicago.In this case, Mr. Kelly faces charges that he produced child pornography, enticed children into sex acts and that he and two former employees conspired to fix his 2008 criminal trial in Illinois by paying off witnesses and victims in an effort to get them to change their stories.Judge Harry Leinenweber of U.S. District Court set the date of Mr. Kelly’s trial for three months after he is scheduled to be sentenced in the Brooklyn case, where he faces 10 years to life in prison after a jury found him guilty of all nine counts against him, including eight violations of an anti-sex trafficking law known as the Mann Act. The Chicago trial has been postponed several times because of the pandemic and the Brooklyn case.The federal charges in Chicago came six months after Mr. Kelly, 54, became the focus of scrutiny from law enforcement following the release of the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” which included testimony from several women who accused the singer of abuse dating back to the 1990s.The conviction in Brooklyn was Mr. Kelly’s first criminal punishment despite a long history of sexual abuse allegations.In 2008, Mr. Kelly was tried in Illinois on 14 counts of child pornography and was ultimately acquitted. According to the federal indictment in the Chicago case, which was filed in July 2019, Mr. Kelly and others paid a witness about $170,000 in 2008 to cancel a news conference at which he planned to announce that he possessed video evidence of Mr. Kelly engaging in sex acts with minors. The indictment also alleged that Mr. Kelly instructed his victims to deny to a grand jury a sexual relationship with the singer.Mr. Kelly’s acquittal in 2008 allowed his music career to flourish, and at the trial in Brooklyn, witnesses said his escape from a conviction emboldened him, describing his behavior as increasingly more disturbing in the following years.Mr. Kelly will later face state sex crime charges in Illinois and Minnesota. More

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      Review: Chamber Music Society Returns, Unchanged

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      The organization opened its season with a program encapsulating a persistently conservative vision of the repertory.Out of the crucible of the past year and a half — a brutal pandemic, shuttered theaters, a renewed push for racial justice — major arts institutions have by and large emerged transformed, or at least chastened. Even in the persistently backward-looking classical music realm, there has been a sense of fresh beginnings, of the extension of earlier ventures toward the new and untried.The Metropolitan Opera reopened with its first work by a Black composer. The New York Philharmonic has returned promising premieres and rarities — including, this week, a program of contemporary pieces on which John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, from 1992, is as close to the standard repertory as it gets. Go to Carnegie Hall or the 92nd Street Y, and on any given night you’re likely to hear something other than chestnuts.Then there’s the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.This 52-year-old organization came back on Tuesday with a well played, depressing concert of Beethoven, Hummel, Schubert and Mendelssohn at Alice Tully Hall. Depressing because the program’s blinkered view of music encapsulates what the society has presented for some time — and what’s on the agenda for the rest of its season.Of the nearly 100 works being offered on its main stage at Tully through next spring, just two are by living composers. One of those, George Crumb’s “Ancient Voices of Children,” was written over 50 years ago; the other, Wynton Marsalis’s quartet “At the Octoroon Balls,” in 1995. (And we’ll only get selections from the Marsalis.)Not that programming should be a question of new-music quotas. There are some artists whose main gifts are for astonishing revivals, not premieres. And there is value in providing older but unfamiliar sounds to audiences. The Philharmonic, for example, has already this season presented a Haydn symphony and a Brahms serenade — neither a rarity, but both rarely played by that orchestra.Chamber Music Society, by contrast, rarely ventures off the beaten path, and almost never into work of our time. (It’s true, you don’t often hear Beethoven’s Op. 104 quintet, his arrangement of one of his early trios, which comes in January.) This is particularly frustrating given that the chamber music field is exploding with new work and, relatively inexpensive to present, offers far easier opportunities for experimentation than orchestras or opera companies.Some caveats are in order. The society’s performances are generally of unimpeachable quality. On Tuesday, Beethoven’s Trio in C minor (Op. 9, No. 3) received an airy reading from the violinist Arnaud Sussmann, the violist Matthew Lipman and the cellist Nicholas Canellakis. Hummel’s Piano Quintet in E flat (Op. 87), the least known work on the program, features a double bass instead of a second violin, a witty minuet and a brief, aching slow movement; Lipman, Canellakis, the pianist Wu Qian, the violinist Richard Lin and the bassist Blake Hinson played it stylishly.Wu Qian and Wu Han — who is, with David Finckel, the society’s artistic director — were graceful in Schubert’s Rondo in A for piano, four hands (D. 951). And Wu Han, Lin, Sussmann (now on viola), Lipman, Canellakis and Hinson came together for a warm, lively performance of Mendelssohn’s Op. 110 Sextet in D, with its unusually heavy complement of low strings and its raucous climax.The society has also given stalwart support over the years to rising musicians. It actively streamed while theaters were closed. It honorably paid artists 50 percent of their promised fees after pandemic cancellations, and will add 75 percent more when those dates are rescheduled.And its performances at Tully are not the sum total of its offerings. Its concerts in the Rose Studio nearby seem to come from another universe, one far more contemporary and creative. The first “New Milestones” program of the season there, on Oct. 28, includes works — the oldest from 2008 — by Marcos Balter, Shih-Hui Chen, George Lewis, Alexandre Lunsqui and Nina Shekhar.But there are just a handful of those performances, and the Rose Studio seats only about 100, versus nearly 1,100 in Tully. For the vast majority of the organization’s audience, the Tully season is the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center — and that audience is being handed a profoundly limited product.It feels like kicking an institution when it’s down to criticize it so sharply as it reopens after such a devastating period. But a conservatism extreme even by classical music’s low standards was a problem with the society before the pandemic. That it seems to have viewed the past 19 months not as an opportunity to re-evaluate and reorient, but as a moment to double down, is unfortunate.Chamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterPresents a program of Puccini, Brahms, Webern and Shostakovich on Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; chambermusicsociety.org. More

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      With His New Album, 'Far In,' Helado Negro Confronts Earthly Anxieties

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      The Ecuadorean American musician’s new album, “Far In,” is filled with celestial lullabies that confront earthly anxieties.The end is weighing heavy on Helado Negro. Some of his unease stems from traditional concerns, like aging (the musician, born Roberto Carlos Lange, turned 41 this year). But some is a consequence of looming global catastrophes: the existential dread of climate change, the seemingly unending nature of the pandemic. “I know the world has always been in some kind of constant conflict and flux,” he said. “But it feels even heavier now.”Since 2009, Lange has crafted ambling, dreamlike music. Over six studio albums and five EPs, he has collaged lunar synths, tape loops and field recordings into gentle experimental compositions that meditate on immigrant identity, healing and tranquillity. In 2019, he received grants from United States Artists and the Foundation for Contemporary Artists, highlighting his immersive, multidisciplinary approach to performance, sound and visual art. “Far In,” his first album for the stalwart indie label 4AD, will bring his subtle hymns to what may be his largest audience yet on Friday.Chatting over a video call from Asheville, N.C. — where Lange and his wife, the artist Kristi Sword, moved this past summer after over a decade in Brooklyn — he offered a tour of his new home, the outside of which is painted sky blue. “I’ve been living in small apartments for 15 years,” Lange explained, as studio equipment rolled by: vintage synthesizers, an antique piano — the foundations of Helado Negro’s soothing, celestial lullabies.Lange’s first full-length album as Helado Negro, “Awe Owe,” blended some of the sounds of his South Florida upbringing into warm bilingual jams, weaving whimsical freak folk into mellow beats and melting marimbas. Since then, Lange, who is the son of Ecuadorean immigrants, has gone more electronic: The albums “Invisible Life” (2013) and “Double Youth” (2014) stitched robotic synths and tender melodies into looping, wandering flurries, not unlike Lange in conversation — he often interrupts one idea for another. On Twitter, he described the songs on “Far In” as “mind meanderings drawn in sound.”“I feel the most comfortable I’ve ever felt expressing through music,” Lange said of his new album, “Far In.”Jacob Biba for The New York TimesLange has spent his whole life daydreaming through film and music. When he was in middle school in the early ’90s, his older brother returned from a high school trip to Europe with a collection of techno, acid jazz and jungle compilations that jump started his obsession with electronic music. Once he got to high school, he would visit a record store in South Beach to buy Aphex Twin and Tortoise CDs for relatives in Georgia.That early exposure to electronic music “really flipped my brain,” Lange said. It led him to underground basement parties hosted by a pirate radio station in Miami, where he was hypnotized by ragga D.J.s and M.C.s. He started making beats and playing the guitar, recording himself on his brother’s computer, which had an early edition of Pro Tools.Lange eventually ended up in Georgia to study computer art and animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he took a class with a professor who introduced him to sound installation. “It just tweaked my brain even more,” he explained. “I was just like, ‘What is this? I want to make stuff like this.’”Lange’s profile rose in 2015 and 2016 with the release of the tracks “Young, Latin and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin,” smooth anthems of affirmation for many Latino listeners contending with xenophobia and racism during Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and early days in office. On tour, after long and demanding performances, fans approached him and shared their own experiences. “It meant a lot to me,” Lange said. “A lot of it was really beautiful, but really hard.”On “Far In,” these themes are a little less literal. “I’m going to hold back from sharing a lot of my own traumas,” he said. “There’s an aspect of sharing experiences and, depending on how intense they are, some of them can make people complicit in your misery.”Lange was partially inspired by the 1991 science-fiction epic “Until the End of the World,” which almost became the title of the project. “I have a good relationship with movies that don’t hold your hand so much,” he said. “That’s why I like that Wim Wenders movie. It starts somewhere and it ends somewhere else.”Ed Horrox, the 4AD executive who signed Helado Negro to the label, said that Lange has a powerful ability to forge connections: “Whether it’s in person, whether it’s on a Zoom call, whether it’s a bloody three-line text,” he said in a video chat, “he’s got a knack for sharing warmth and positivity.” Horrox first found Lange’s work while searching for music to play on his London-based radio show, “Happy Death,” and followed him through the years. The response to Lange’s arrival on 4AD from listeners proclaiming him “my favorite artist” was “quite overwhelming,” Horrox said.The “Far In” standout “Outside the Outside” is a soft-focus disco groove with laser synths and thumping bass that’s an ode to the small pleasures of diasporic life: Its video is a montage of camcorder footage of house parties his family threw in the 1980s, when they would stay up dancing to salsa or merengue. “I used to wake up and it would be 7 in the morning and people would still be downstairs drinking,” Lange said with a laugh.“La Naranja,” a prayer for the apocalypse, arrives near the end of the album. “Y sé que sólo tú y yo/Podemos salvar el mundo,” Lange sings with a sunny glow. “And I know that only you and I/Can save the world.” “La Naranja” oozes radical hope, but many of the songs on “Far In” are also about confronting the end with a sense of presence, even with the knowledge that doom is near, like “Aguas Frías” and “Wind Conversations,” both inspired by the ecological drama of the Texas landscape. (Lange and Sword were in Marfa during the first months of the pandemic working on “Kite Symphony,” a multimedia project documenting the wind, sound and light of West Texas.)L’Rain, a Brooklyn-based experimentalist who played bass on three of the album’s songs, said softness surrounds Lange, both as a collaborator and vocalist. “It’s an intimacy that’s really immediate and really visceral,” she said in a phone interview. “When working with Roberto, on every level — from the way that he emails and the way he schedules rehearsals and talks to us about the music and asks us our opinions — you just feel respected and cared for,” she said.The intentions Lange set for the project have offered inner peace, too. “I feel the most comfortable I’ve ever felt expressing through music,” he said. “Sound and music has always been that for me: It’s always been that great place to enter into. That’s the best way that I’ve found myself to be a part of that idea — of being present within.” More

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      At 90, a Composer Is Still Sending Out Blasts

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      Sofia Gubaidulina and her richly colored, rhythmically adventurous music are being celebrated around the world this season.APPEN, Germany — The composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who turns 90 on Sunday, lives in a humble brick bungalow in this small town outside Hamburg. She receives guests in the dining room; to get there, they are led through the kitchen to a small round table decked out with a spread of strong tea, something sweet and the Russian Orthodox icon known as Our Lady of Kazan.It’s all modest and unassuming. But there are clues everywhere of an eminent career in music. A Steinway grand piano, a gift from Rostropovich, has pride of place in the living room. On a bookshelf is a recent CD of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, conducted by Andris Nelsons, who will lead Gubaidulina’s 2003 work “The Light of the End” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra this week. A gong hangs on a wall and a set of bamboo wind chimes hovers near a sliding-glass door — reminders of the kind of instruments that mark her richly colored, rhythmically adventurous compositions.Gubaidulina’s bright eyes are undiminished by age. A neighbor usually helps her prepare for guests, but couldn’t come on a recent afternoon. “Is the tea all right?” Gubaidulina asked. Then the conversation turned toward faith, which stands at the center of her work.“I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art,” she said, a hint of generous fervor in her voice.Her birthday is being celebrated with a sustained burst of high-profile events. On Friday Nelsons and Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, Germany, will release a Deutsche Grammophon recording of “The Light of the End” and two more recent pieces: her third violin concerto, the angst-filled “Dialogue: I and You,” which suggests a fracture between the soloist, Vadim Repin, and the orchestra, and “The Wrath of God,” which begins with a blast of Wagner tubas and, 17 minutes later, abruptly ends.Excerpt from ‘The Wrath of God’Gewandhaus Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)At the Gewandhaus, where Nelsons is the music director, she is the featured composer through next season. In the coming months, her music — already common on programs around the world — will be played in cities including Moscow, where she lived for decades; Munich; Berlin; Cleveland; Tallinn, Estonia; Katowice, Poland; and Utrecht, the Netherlands.And in her native Tatar region of Russia, some 600 miles east of Moscow, where Russian and Central Asian influences overlap, a festival in Kazan celebrates her with a week of chamber and orchestral works starting Monday. There, she studied piano and composition before continuing her studies in Moscow, starting in her early 20s; her talent was recognized by Shostakovich, whose encouragement in the late 1950s was a key event in her life.She found a home in Moscow’s musical scene but was kept perilously at the edges of the Soviet Union’s conservative musical establishment. She made a living writing film scores while experimenting with non-Western percussion instruments.“I give a lot of importance to percussion instruments,” she said. “They contain the essence of existence.”Gubaidulina in her home outside Hamburg. A festival in Kazan, Russia, where she studied, celebrates her with a week of chamber and orchestral works starting Monday.Mario Wezel for The New York TimesIn 1970, she was baptized into the Russian Orthodox faith, but came to see her heritage as cosmopolitan, citing her Tatar father’s Muslim background (her grandfather was an imam), her Jewish music teachers and what she described in a 1990 BBC documentary as “the spiritual nourishment” from German cultural heroes like Bach and Beethoven.In the early 1980s, she had a breakthrough in the West with “Offertorium,” a concerto written for the violinist Gidon Kremer. Consisting of a Webern-like disintegration of a theme by Bach — which is later reconstituted, but in reverse — the moving piece established Gubaidulina’s international reputation as something of a spiritualist.By that point, she had also developed an arcane compositional technique with her companion (and later third husband), the music theoretician Pyotr Meshchaninov. Relying on numerical sequences to plot out structure and rhythm, Gubaidulina uses devices such as Fibonacci numbers to generate a series of cryptic sketches, which eventually result in a score. Though much of her home feels wide open, her composing studio, fashioned out of an attic space, is a “secret room,” said Hans-Ulrich Duffek, the director of Sikorski, her German publisher since the 1980s.Initially grouped with her fellow late Soviet-era composers Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov, Gubaidulina never settled on a definitive or identifiable style. “She uses a great variety of musical styles,” Duffek said. “Tonality may be predominant, but you will find dodecaphony, atonality, pentatonic scales, quotations, aleatoric passages and tonality.”“Sometimes,” he added, “side by side.”In the 1980s, Gubaidulina had a breakthrough in the West with “Offertorium,” a concerto written for the violinist Gidon Kremer.SPUTNIK/AlamyWhat her longer, single-movement concertos tend to have in common is “an ongoing narrative,” said the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, for whom Gubaidulina wrote her second violin concerto, “In Tempus Praesens,” in 2007. Her pieces often seem to move from disorder or conflict to something akin to sanctification.In “Glorious Percussion,” a 2008 concerto for orchestra and percussion ensemble, the five featured percussionists use a dizzying array of instruments — including marimbas, xylophones, sleigh bells, glass chimes, bamboo chimes and tuned gongs — to stage “a bit of a tussle,” said the percussionist Colin Currie, who helped organize the British premiere in 2019.“The ensemble try to build up enough of their own momentum to come out on top,” he said, adding: “The orchestra fights back with large forces, with crescendos going back and forth. My feeling is they’re all trying to work it out.” Then the climax is “a moment of reconciliation, consolidation and redemption.”Gubaidulina and Meshchaninov made their way west in the early 1990s, in the wake of the chaos following the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Her only child, Nadia Gubaidulina, a biochemist from her first marriage, stayed in Russia.The ’90s were for her a period of major commissions from leading soloists and ensembles, and an expanding use of unusual instrumentation and unconventional sounds. In her 1996 Viola Concerto, written for Yuri Bashmet and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she introduced the rumbling power of Wagner tubas. The piece “develops the very high register for the viola,” said Antoine Tamestit, who has been playing it since 2006, “and then opposes it with the tubas.”In 1997 she composed “The Canticle of the Sun” for Rostropovich; written for cello, a small choir and percussion, the piece calls for the soloist to retune a string between phrases, to use a stick instead of a bow, and to eventually replace the cello with a flexatone, which can sound like a musical saw. Based on a song by St. Francis of Assisi that thanks God for the splendors of creation, it has become one of her most performed works.“Dialogue: I and You,” the violin concerto, concludes with the soloist’s long, slowly depleting, sky-high A, which Duffek said might suggest “the soul having risen to heaven after a long earthly fight.” Some Gubaidulina watchers sense a new darkness entering her recent work. Nelsons described “The Wrath of God” as “really scary.”Speaking over tea, she used the word “tragic” to describe the effects of pieces of music or individual instruments, but it might also be applied to her own life. In 2004 her daughter died of cancer at 44, and Meshchaninov died in 2006 after suffering an aortic aneurysm.“Sofia’s tragedy is that she wasn’t able to be at their bedsides when they died,” Duffek said, though he said he doesn’t believe she responded to the losses in her music. A photograph of her daughter sits across from Gubaidulina’s dining room table.“My daughter is always with me,” she said, “always supporting me.”Her birthday celebrations will culminate in a planned premiere next season of a new piece commissioned by the Gewandhaus and Boston Symphony. It will have the same instrumentation as “The Wrath of God.”“I love the sound of Wagner tubas,” she said, smiling broadly. More

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      For Sharon D Clarke, a ‘Big Sing’ and a Big Broadway Moment

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      The Olivier Award winner stars in “Caroline, or Change” in a role that pays tribute to “all Black women trying to make their way through this life.”Fifty floors above street level, in her temporary Manhattan apartment with its panoramic views, the West End theater star Sharon D Clarke was missing her wife.Clarke has, it’s true, an enviably glamorous career. Exhibit A at the moment is her title role in Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s musical, “Caroline, or Change,” at Studio 54. But that’s no buffer against waking alone too early in a strange bed, not yet adjusted to the time difference between New York and London, or making your Broadway debut without the love of your life in the audience, her perfect two-decade record of being there on your shows’ first night ruined by a Covid travel ban.“To be on Broadway and to not have my wife, and to not be able to share that with her, was hard,” Clarke said the day after the first preview of “Caroline,” her eyes welling above a chic purple mask. “Because there’s so much joy in that, you know?”In fairness, she had been talking animatedly for an hour and a half before she let any tears fall, and then only because she was still so moved by a visit the night before from a friend: Wendell Pierce, who played Willy Loman to her Linda in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2019. He flew in from Louisiana to see the performance and surprise her afterward, knowing that, in the absence of her wife, she would need someone else in the audience who loved her.Clarke and Wendell Pierce in a 2019 production of “Death of a Salesman,” for which she won her third Olivier Award last year.Brinkhoff-MoegenburgClarke’s turn as Linda Loman won her the most recent of her three Olivier Awards. Her second, the year before, was for playing Caroline Thibodeaux in “Caroline, or Change,” a role she has lived with since Michael Longhurst’s 2017 production at Chichester Festival Theater.It moved to London, then into the West End. There, Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, the show achieved “the titanic dimensions of greatness,” while Clarke delivered “a climactic aria that seems to shake the theater’s very foundations.”“Caroline’s a big sing,” Clarke said, casually understating the scope and intensity of the role’s vocal demands. When the show was new, Kushner worried that no one but Tonya Pinkins, the actor the part was written for, would ever be able to do it.“Sharon is a genuinely great artist,” Kushner said. “Both Jeanine and I felt, immediately when we saw her at Chichester: OK, we have to get this performance over to New York. People have to see it.”So over Clarke came, to re-create Longhurst’s production with an American cast for Roundabout Theater Company — the first Broadway revival of a musical whose original run, in 2004, lasted only 136 performances. In March 2020, the show was a day from its first preview when the industry shut down.In Clarke’s experience, the fullness with which Caroline is written makes her unique among Black female lead roles: “an ordinary citizen” — not the subject of a bioplay, or a character who is an entertainer — depicted with nuance, complexity and a deep well of emotion. A divorced mother of four in 1963, Caroline works as a maid for the Gellmans, a Jewish family in Lake Charles, La. Doing laundry in a basement “16 feet below sea level,” as the opening song goes, she earns too little money to keep her own family above water.Noah Gellman, an 8-year-old missing his dead mother, Betty, worships Caroline. In Clarke’s invented back story, Caroline and Betty used to smoke cigarettes together in the basement, and Betty is the one who bought the nice washing machine, to ease Caroline’s workload.But Rose, Noah’s new stepmother, can’t even get Caroline’s name right. She calls her Carolyn.“I remember doing a Q.&A., and funny enough, it was with some Americans in London,” Clarke said. “And the white woman said to me something like, ‘Well, we didn’t quite understand why Caroline was so mad at Rose.’ And I was like, OK. Wow.“I said, ‘You work with someone who never calls you by your name. Never. How does that make you feel? And this is a new person coming into a household who thinks it’s all right to just call you what the hell they think your name is, and she’s supposed to be grateful for that, and you don’t have a problem with that? That’s not something that’s occurred to you?’”Clarke as Caroline, with Adam Makké as Noah and Arica Jackson as the washing machine, in the musical, which is now in previews.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt is especially important to Clarke that the audience has the full length of the musical to understand the myriad reasons for Caroline’s mostly suppressed rage, so “people didn’t come away just going, ‘Oh, angry Black woman.’”“Every time Rose calls her Carolyn, I make her flinch,” Clarke said. “Every time.”The daughter of a seamstress and a carpenter, Clarke sees playing Caroline as “a chance to honor all maids, all women, all single mothers, all Black women trying to make their way through this life.”“In a way for me,” she added, “it’s honoring my mum, who left Jamaica in the ’50s to come to England to forge a new way for us in a society that didn’t want them. You know: ‘No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs.’”Racism and the accelerating fight for civil rights are central themes in “Caroline, or Change,” whose Broadway premiere was directed by George C. Wolfe and starred Pinkins in the title role, with Anika Noni Rose as Caroline’s fiery teenage daughter, Emmie.Tesori, who said Clarke is “a beautiful collaborator,” is struck by a particular quality she believes Clarke and Pinkins have in common.“These women who take center stage,” she said, “I always feel like they’re incredibly fragile and incredibly enduring. There is something about their ability to go what I call D.F.C., down [expletive] center, and own it. There is no question about whether they should be there.”Kushner based the show partly on his own childhood in Lake Charles, and Caroline loosely on Maudie Lee Davis, who worked for his family and gave him permission to dedicate it to her. Out of all he has written, he said, “I think it’s my favorite thing.”He was in London for rehearsals of “Angels in America” at the National Theater in 2017 when Longhurst invited him to what he said would be a very rough run-through of the first act of “Caroline.” He warned that Clarke, who was starring in a West End show at the time, would not be singing full out. Yet Kushner, then new to her work, thought it was “one of the most electrifying performances I’ve ever seen.”“She has this sort of adamantine presence onstage. And that weird ability that great actors have to sort of say, ‘OK, now you’re all going to feel this because I’m feeling it,’” he said. “I’ve never seen her not be completely present and putting herself through the very difficult things that the part requires, not just vocally but also emotionally.”Longhurst, who called Clarke “a deep joy,” said that in the Chichester production, she would not start rehearsing until she had hugged everyone in the room.“Less than a week in,” he said, “she had the full company just in awe of her and, you know, led with love. That’s how she does it.”Such personal warmth helps when the musical, in his phrasing, “goes to an extreme place” with an explosive confrontation between Caroline and Noah, a role shared by three boys who alternate performances. Clarke’s connection with them is vital.“The kid has to sort of feel safe to say those things to her and know that she knows that it’s acting,” Longhurst said.But it’s a fanciful show, too, where Caroline’s appliances come to life, and her children end Act One with a sweet, infectious fantasy number involving a singing moon.Because of growth spurts and cracking voices, “Caroline” had to replace some of its child actors post-shutdown. But Clarke knew throughout that she had the show to return to — which she said made a “ten thousandfold” difference to her mental state amid the industry’s dormancy.After a few months back in London with her wife, Susie McKenna, a director, Clarke started getting voice-over work, which took the pressure off creatively and financially.“It’s a hard thing to say to people, but lockdown? I really enjoyed it,” she said. “We’ve just been able to cook and dance around the kitchen and live.”They took weekslong trips to their house in Spain, and for the first time they didn’t have just one day off at Christmas in a calendar crammed with shows. (They met, in 1999, doing a “Cinderella” pantomime.)So last month, when Clarke came back to “Caroline” — after she and some British members of the creative team endured a visa-approval delay so lengthy that Roundabout asked Senator Chuck Schumer’s office to intervene — she felt refreshed, if not “match fit for eight shows a week,” she said.“You kind of have to build back up that stamina, and you can only do that by doing the show,” Clarke said of performing eight shows a week after such a long break.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“It’s just like being a tennis player and not having a match for a year and a half, and then going, ‘Oh, I’ve got the big match with Steffi Graf today!’” she said. “You kind of have to build back up that stamina, and you can only do that by doing the show.”Clarke admires the way that Broadway theaters shut down “as a community” and are opening back up the same way, with none of the haphazard stop-and-start that has bedeviled London stages.For her, though, New York was never the aspiration — even if she did tour clubs here a few decades ago as the singer for the briefly Billboard chart-topping group Nomad. Clarke decided long ago that she was not going to be one of the many Black British actors who go to the United States in search of a better career than they can build at home.“If we all leave, you can brush us under the carpet and go, ‘Oh, there are not the people here to do the work. We don’t have the talent,’” she said. “No. We’re here. I’m going to stay and be in that front line so that you remember that we’re here.”On the other hand? She would not mind spending enough time in the United States to “do a nice TV series or a movie, earn some decent money, take a year out and eat our way around the world.”She and McKenna have wanted to do that since well before their pandemic rediscovery of leisure.“But now even more so,” Clarke said. “Plus, you know, with the way that the world is going, I want to see the Barrier Reef while there’s still something left to see.” More

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      Broadway Is Back. Here’s What It’s Like for Theatergoers.

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      Seeing theater these days can involve waiting in lines to show proof of vaccination and getting rapid coronavirus tests for young children. Many fans seem undeterred.The long-awaited return of Broadway has brought back many familiar preshow rituals — and also spurred a few that are new. One takes place a few hours before curtain time in middle of Times Square, under a canopy with a sandwich board sign proclaiming: “Broadway Show Testing Site.”It is there that some of the most dedicated theatergoers in the city — children under 12 who are ineligible for the vaccines theaters require — are taken by their parents to submit to nasal swabs so they can get the negative coronavirus test results they need to see shows.Remy Keller, a 5-year-old from Chicago who needed a test so she could see “The Lion King,” was among a crowd there on a recent Saturday, bracing herself for the swab. There were a few tears.“There’s a lot of things we all have to do to minimize the effects of the virus on vulnerable people; I’m not saying I’m not willing to jump through the hoops, but why are we putting the kids through all this?” her mother, Avery Keller, said, noting that her daughter has already had to be tested dozens of times for school. “I think we’ve got to really weigh the mental health impacts of this on our children.”The return of live performance — on stages from Broadway to Carnegie Hall to Lincoln Center to the Brooklyn Academy of Music — after the long shutdown has been a cause for celebration for culture-starved theatergoers and music and dance lovers. But as with so many things in the age of the coronavirus, coming back has entailed a few adjustments: the ability to deftly juggle proofs of vaccination and photo IDs and tickets to get inside; preshow announcements that now urge people to keep their cellphones off and their masks on; and the absence of intermissions at some concerts and dance performances.Najah Hetsberger, 21, who returned to Broadway on a recent weeknight to see a show for the first time since before the pandemic shutdown in March 2020, was delighted to find that her fellow theatergoers were actually doing what they had been told.Some of the most dedicated theatergoers in the city are children under 12, who must get coronavirus tests to see Broadway shows since they are not yet eligible for the vaccines.John Taggart for The New York Times“I didn’t see anyone with their mask down, even below their nose,” she said after emerging from a performance of the play “Chicken & Biscuits.” “Everyone was following directions. I think people know, and want theater to come back and stay.”Theaters have grown more adept at swiftly managing the lines of people waiting to get in. In most cases, people get their vaccine status checked first, then move more briskly through security and into the theater, where ushers scan their tickets. Still, it pays to get to the theater a little early these days: The checks do sometimes result in delays, and some music and dance companies have had to hold their curtains a few minutes to give the people waiting in line extra time to get inside.Once inside a venue, other changes await. In the minutes leading up to performances of “American Utopia,” the David Byrne concert show, ushers stroll up and down the aisles of the St. James Theater with poster-size signs that urge: “Please Mask Up.” The usual preshow announcements admonishing people to turn off their cellphones now also have other business to attend to. “God told me to tell you to keep your mask on,” ran the radio-style announcement at a recent performance of “Chicken & Biscuits.” “He did, so don’t question it.”And, at a recent performance of “The Lehman Trilogy,” the audience chuckled knowingly at a newly written line about the flu pandemic of 1918 and the ensuing “protests in San Francisco, against the wearing of masks.”In interviews, theatergoers almost universally agreed that they were willing to tolerate longer, slower lines, wear masks for hours on end and take their children to get properly timed coronavirus tests if that was what it took to see live theater again.“I feel comfortable and safe because I know everyone here had to show proof of vaccination or a negative test,” said Heather Teta, of New York, who came to “The Lion King” with her 9- and 6-year-old daughters. “They have negative tests and are all masked. We’ll do whatever we need to do to get back.”In interviews, theatergoers agreed that they were willing to tolerate longer, slower lines and wear masks to see live theater again. A crowd waited in line at the TKTS booth in Times Square recently for discounted tickets.John Taggart for The New York TimesBroadway and union officials say that the reopening has been free of the sort of dramatic dust-ups some flight attendants have experienced while trying to enforce masking rules on planes. “Thankfully, so far so good,” said Carol Bokun, the theatrical business representative with IATSE Local 306.Disney Theatrical Productions shared survey data collected from people who attended “The Lion King” that appeared to suggest that the testing requirements for children had not been a major deterrent. The self-reported data showed that 29 percent of parties attending the show so far this fall had included children, an increase from 21 percent in late 2019, before the pandemic shutdown.When it comes to snacks and drinks, theaters are taking various approaches. Several Broadway theaters now offer concessions — including “featured cocktails” that can run to $22 a pop — and allow people to lower their masks briefly while eating or drinking. Other venues have yet to reopen their food and beverage service, reluctant to encourage any masklessness at all. The Metropolitan Opera has closed most of its concession areas, but its bar in the airiest section of the Grand Tier is now open, along with its restaurant. To encourage mask-wearing, a security guard politely asks people not to take their food or drink outside the designated areas.And intermissions are growing rarer. The New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall and New York City Ballet have all experimented with slightly shorter programs with no intermissions, in part to minimize the amount of time patrons are thrust together in crowds. The faster evenings, which get out earlier, are proving popular with some music lovers, even if the long intermissionless stretches test the bladders of others.The vaccine mandates for live performances are not that different from the ones required to dine indoors in New York City, which may have made the adjustment smoother. There has been some opposition, though: A group of small Off Broadway theaters and comedy clubs in Manhattan have formally objected to the mandates in court. They recently sued Mayor Bill de Blasio over the city’s vaccine mandate, claiming it had been enforced unequally.And there are still some situations that can be difficult to navigate. To get into a theater, adults must show that they have been fully vaccinated. But the entry rules are slightly different for children under 12. Since vaccines have not yet been authorized for children that age, they are required to present either a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of the performance to get into a Broadway show, or a negative rapid test taken within six hours of curtain time. (The Met Opera and Carnegie Hall are not yet allowing unvaccinated children in at all; New York City Ballet has said it will allow children under 12 to attend its 47-show run of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” with a negative PCR test.)Survey data provided by Disney Theatrical Productions collected from people who attended “The Lion King” appeared to suggest that the testing requirements for children had not been a major deterrent in keeping families from seeing the show.John Taggart for The New York TimesThe new theater rules posed a difficulty for Gary Spino, 59, who was planning to see “Stomp” the other day with his son, Nicholas. But Nicholas had turned 12 just days earlier, so he had been unable to get his second dose of the vaccine. The show’s rules, though, said that as a 12-year old, Nicholas needed to be fully vaccinated..css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}.css-1in8jot{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1in8jot{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1in8jot:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1in8jot{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}What to Know About Covid-19 Booster ShotsThe F.D.A. authorized booster shots for a select group of people who received their second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at least six months before. That group includes: vaccine recipients who are 65 or older or who live in long-term care facilities; adults who are at high risk of severe Covid-19 because of an underlying medical condition; health care workers and others whose jobs put them at risk. People with weakened immune systems are eligible for a third dose of either Pfizer or Moderna four weeks after the second shot.Regulators have not authorized booster shots for recipients of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines yet. A key advisory committee to the F.D.A. voted unanimously on Oct. 14 to recommend a third dose of the Moderna vaccine for many of its recipients. The same panel voted unanimously on Oct. 15 to recommend booster shots of Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine for all adult recipients. The F.D.A. typically follows the panel’s advice, and should rule within days.The C.D.C. has said the conditions that qualify a person for a booster shot include: hypertension and heart disease; diabetes or obesity; cancer or blood disorders; weakened immune system; chronic lung, kidney or liver disease; dementia and certain disabilities. Pregnant women and current and former smokers are also eligible.The F.D.A. authorized boosters for workers whose jobs put them at high risk of exposure to potentially infectious people. The C.D.C. says that group includes: emergency medical workers; education workers; food and agriculture workers; manufacturing workers; corrections workers; U.S. Postal Service workers; public transit workers; grocery store workers.For now, it is not recommended. Pfizer vaccine recipients are advised to get a Pfizer booster shot, and Moderna and Johnson & Johnson recipients should wait until booster doses from those manufacturers are approved. ​​The F.D.A. is planning to allow Americans to receive a different vaccine as a booster from the one they initially received. The “mix and match” approach could be approved once boosters for Moderna and Johnson & Johnson recipients are authorized.Yes. The C.D.C. says the Covid vaccine may be administered without regard to the timing of other vaccines, and many pharmacy sites are allowing people to schedule a flu shot at the same time as a booster dose.“We don’t know if they’re going to let us in because he only has one shot,” said Spino, who acknowledged that the situation was causing considerable stress. “Honestly we were thinking about pretending that he’s still just 11.”They made it in: Reached after the performance, Spino said checkers had let Nicholas attend “Stomp” with proof of a negative rapid test he had taken earlier in the day.At some shows, adults who have been unable to show proof that they have been fully vaccinated, and children who lack the proper test results, have been politely pulled off the lines to get in. If they cannot satisfy the requirements, they are offered a refund or a chance to exchange their tickets for a later performance.Several Broadway officials said they could not or would not provide specific data on exactly how many people are prevented from entering shows each evening, or how many returns or exchanges they have processed this fall. But they insisted such cases were isolated and limited in number.“It’s a very small handful across all our theaters,” said Todd Rappaport, a spokesman for the Shubert Organization, which owns and operates a number of Broadway theaters.Many theatergoers are happy to be back. Amy Ferreira, 46, of Millbury, Mass., said she had to pay roughly $167 for a PCR coronavirus test for her 10-year-old daughter, Eva, before coming to New York, but that it was worth it to see “Hamilton.” It was Eva’s birthday, and her family had gotten tickets months ago. Together, they had watched the Disney+ version many times, and Eva was singing the chorus to “My Shot.”They had decided they could not throw theirs away.“She goes to school and wears a mask,” Ferreira said of her daughter. “So she’s out and about. This was as safe as it can possibly get at this point. We can’t live in a bubble.”Michael Paulson, Julia Jacobs and Laura Zornosa contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      PinkPantheress’s Slivers of Dance-Pop Play With Memory Like a Toy

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      The British singer and producer’s debut release, “To Hell With It,” is full of familiar samples, rendered hazily.Some of the most striking music suffusing TikTok this year has come from PinkPantheress, a British singer and producer who sounds like she’s flirting and aching all at once. Snippets of her songs “Break It Off” and, especially, “Just for Me” have been an optimal melancholic soundtrack for the perpetual tug of war between romanticization and mopiness that dominates a certain corner of online teenage life.Part of main-character sadness is hearing yourself in the culture you’re surrounding yourself with — and sometimes, meshing what’s in your heart with what’s in your ear. That’s how PinkPantheress works: She sounds as if she’s listening and performing all at once, like you are hearing her singing along to whatever’s bumping out of her speakers. Plenty of her songs are based on deeply familiar source material. “Break It Off” functions as an extension of Adam F’s “Circles,” a foundational drum-and-bass song from the mid-’90s. “Pain” rides a bed lifted from a karaoke version of Sweet Female Attitude’s “Flowers,” a pop U.K. garage anthem from 2000.At what point does an experience become a memory? And at what point does a memory become history, fixed in place? We often think of sampling as a choice emanating from a steady, long-in-the-rearview position, but it can function in liminal spaces, too.“Break It Off” and “Just for Me” are both elegant in their own right, and also encapsulate the enthusiasm and thrill of listening to someone else’s elegant song, one that rousts you from your shell and thrusts you into your own joy or sadness, or both at the same time.This layered approach makes PinkPantheress’s debut album, the warmly ecstatic and cheekily gloomy “To Hell With It,” so striking. It’s short, controlled and lived-in.The press materials refer to “To Hell With It,” which includes 10 songs and totals less than 19 minutes, as a mixtape — often, that’s a head fake designed to avoid the pressure and scrutiny still associated with the term “album,” which is an increasingly outmoded concept anyway. But in PinkPantheress’s case, using the term mixtape invokes one of the classic uses of the phrase, a collection of rapping over other people’s beats. In other words, a way of testing yourself against the context of the recent past. The brevity of the songs underscores that — they are immediate and flexible.But unlike, say, the sometimes bombastic sample choices that appear in mainstream pop, hip-hop and reggaeton, which are so grand and smoothly polished that they become obstacles to creativity, PinkPantheress’s relationship to her source material is at the level of hazy tribute. “I Must Apologise” reimagines the woozy jangle of Crystal Waters’s “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless).” “Passion” opens with a light acoustic guitar that recalls the intro of Craig David’s pop-garage smash “7 Days.” “Last Valentines” incorporates bits from Linkin Park’s “Forgotten.” They’re suggestive, but not delineative.Which leaves plenty of room for PinkPantheress, a pop singer with light R&B contours, to hone her vocal approach. Lost in the conversation around her relationship to yesteryear is the way even her singing encapsulates the tension of memory.Her writing is diaristic in the sense that it doesn’t always hew to a clean syllabic structure — sometimes she’s cramming words to make them fit, and sometimes she’s lingering over them as if humbled. The key juxtaposition in her music is how the lightly detached sweetness in her tone masks the sweaty anxiety of her words. Take “Just for Me,” which verges on saccharine while spooky obsession hovers just beneath the surface:I followed you today I was in my carI wanted to come and see you from afarIf you turned around and saw me I would dieI’d pretend I was a person driving byOn “All My Friends Know,” she sings about what happens after a relationship ends, but you can’t quite tell everyone yet, especially your mother: “She knows that I’m so fond of you/So she can’t ignore how everyday/She knocks but I don’t answer my door.”Most of “To Hell With It” is about this sort of romantic anxiety, the sort that often exists in your head to fill the space left behind by a failed love. But PinkPantheress also applies the same clarity to her family on “Passion,” a song about a broken-down family: “I called my dad, he told me, ‘There’s no room for me’/Down at the house that we had when we were living as a three.”PinkPantheress self-produced her earlier songs, which were teased as snippets on TikTok and released on SoundCloud. Those older tracks have been mixed and mastered for this release and sound crisper. On some new songs, though, like “Reason” and “All My Friends Know,” the balance is slightly off: She sounds more firmly embedded in the music, not quite riding atop it. It’s a light disruption of her mode of simultaneous performance and listening.But in the same way that TikTok provided an optimal milieu for PinkPantheress to try out this style, the app, which accelerates all culture consumption, has begun to reabsorb her, too. She herself has become source material of recent nostalgia for others — recently, “Just for Me” was sampled by the melodic drill rapper Central Cee, first on TikTok, and later on a full song, “Obsessed With You.” She’s someone else’s memory now.PinkPantheress“To Hell With It”(Elektra/Parlophone) More