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      Jerry Bradley, Who Helped Remake Country Music, Dies at 83

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      A longtime Nashville executive, he was the driving force behind “Wanted! The Outlaws,” the 1976 album that sold a million copies and shook up the status quo.Jerry Bradley, a record executive who apprenticed with two of the most storied producers in country music — his father, Owen Bradley, and the guitarist Chet Atkins — before challenging that legacy and shaking up the industry, died on Monday at his home in Mount Juliet, Tenn., near Nashville. He was 83.His death was announced by Elice Cuff-Campbell, senior director of media relations for BMI Nashville. No cause was given.Mr. Bradley was best known as the driving force behind “Wanted! The Outlaws,” the groundbreaking 1976 compilation featuring music by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Tompall Glaser and Mr. Jennings’s wife, Jessi Colter.Rowdy and irreverent, the record was an out-of-left-field success, certified by the Recording Industry Association of America as the first million-selling album in the history of country music. It also ruffled the Nashville status quo, posing a threat to the hegemony of the smooth Nashville Sound associated with the work of Mr. Bradley’s father and Mr. Atkins.The term “outlaw” had been gaining traction in country circles since the early 1970s, when the publicist Hazel Smith and others started using it to describe the do-it-yourself, anti-establishment ethos of Mr. Nelson and Mr. Jennings. But it was Jerry Bradley, then head of the Nashville division of RCA Records, who had the foresight to package the emerging outlaw aesthetic and promote it to a wider public.That included modeling the album’s cover after a Western-style “most wanted” poster sporting mug shots of the four singers on the record. And in a nod to the outlaw movement’s younger, more rock-oriented audience, Mr. Bradley enlisted the Rolling Stone journalist Chet Flippo to write the liner notes.“The appearance and the marketing of the album were extremely important in making Nashville look hip for the first time,” Mr. Flippo said in discussing Mr. Bradley’s achievement in a segment of the 2003 BBC documentary series “Lost Highway: The Story of Country Music.”Mr. Bradley was the driving force behind “Wanted! The Outlaws,” which the Recording Industry Association of America certified as the first million-selling album in the history of country music.Building on the unprecedented success of “Wanted!,” Mr. Bradley would go on to sign future superstars like Ronnie Milsap, Eddie Rabbitt and the band Alabama during his nine-year tenure at RCA. Each of those acts would release numerous No. 1 hits for the label while reinvigorating the country airwaves with more wide-ranging pop, rock and soul sensibilities.Mr. Bradley also directed the careers of several established country stars while at RCA. He produced chart-topping late-1970s hits for Charley Pride and supervised the making of “Here You Come Again” (1977), Dolly Parton’s first million-selling album. He was even involved in Elvis Presley’s mid-’70s return to the top of the country charts after an almost 20-year absence, re-establishing his connection with his core country audience shortly before his death.“I wasn’t so much a musical leader,” Mr. Bradley said, assessing his legacy in an interview commemorating his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2019. “I was more of a coach.”Jerry Owen Bradley was born in Nashville on Jan. 30, 1940, one of two children of William Bradley, known as Owen, and Mary (Franklin) Bradley, known as Katherine. His father, a former orchestra leader, became one of the chief architects of the Nashville Sound through his work as a producer for the likes of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. His mother was a homemaker.Jerry graduated from Hillsboro High School and as a teenager raced sports cars at the Nashville speedway.In the early 1960s, after attending Peabody College, he began working at Forest Hills Music, the family’s music publishing company. He also started spending time at the Bradley’s Barn recording studio, where, under the tutelage of his father and his Uncle Harold (both are also members of the Country Music Hall of Fame), he observed sessions by the likes of Joan Baez, Brenda Lee and Dinah Shore and on occasion contributed to them.In 1970, eager to forge his own path in the music business, Mr. Bradley went to work for Chet Atkins at RCA, where he became a liaison with the label’s headquarters in New York. Three years later, when cancer curtailed Mr. Atkins’s activities, Mr. Bradley succeeded him as head of RCA’s Nashville operations.Mr. Bradley left RCA in 1982 and, after a brief hiatus, became general manager of the Opryland Music Group, which had recently acquired Acuff-Rose, the music publisher whose holdings included the catalogs of luminaries like Hank Williams, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers. Not one to rest on his laurels, Mr. Bradley recruited a new generation of songwriters, including Kenny Chesney, before his retirement in 2002.Mr. Bradley in 2019, the year he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.Donn Jones/CMAA longtime board member of the Country Music Association, Mr. Bradley played a crucial role in the development of the CMA Music Festival. Held annually in Nashville since the early 1970s (when it was called Fan Fair), the event showcases some 400 artists performing for 100,000 or so fans over four days.Mr. Bradley is survived by a daughter, Leigh Jankiv; a son, Clay; five grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and a sister, Patsy Bradley. Connie (Darnell) Bradley, his wife of 42 years and a prominent executive in the country music industry, died in 2021. His marriage to Gwynn Hastings Kellam, the mother of his children, ended in divorce; she died in 2001.“Greatness doesn’t come through blood; it is achieved through action and invention,” Kyle Young, chief executive of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, said, reflecting on Mr. Bradley’s entrepreneurship at the Bradley Hall of Fame induction.“Jerry Bradley had his father, Owen, and his uncle, Harold, as north stars,” Mr. Young went on. “He understood that he could not imitate or reproduce their gifts or their manners. He would have to find his own path.” More

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      Steve Pieters, Pastor Who Spoke of AIDS in Famed Interview, Dies at 70

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      He had the disease and was interviewed on the PTL network in 1985 by Tammy Faye Bakker, a broadcast that was said to have changed minds and hearts.In 1985, when fear and homophobia were still driving much of the conversation surrounding AIDS, the Rev. A. Stephen Pieters, a gay pastor who had the disease, was a decidedly different voice.That May, at the St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica, Calif., presiding at a mass for people with AIDS attended by hundreds, he declared: “Rather than feel deserted by God, I have never been more sure of God’s love for me. God did not give me this disease. God is with me in this disease.”That September, he spoke to The Los Angeles Times about the ostracism people with AIDS were encountering.“Some people ask, ‘How is it different from cancer?’” he said. “Well, most people with cancer aren’t asked not to use the bathroom in a friend’s house or served dinner on paper plates. I’ve had more meals on paper plates in the last year than I’ve had in my whole life.”One appearance he made that year had a particularly profound impact: In November 1985 he was interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker on the PTL (Praise the Lord) television network, which reached millions of Christian viewers, most of them conservative.It was a sympathetic interview in which Mr. Pieters spoke forthrightly about being gay and about his illness, and Ms. Bakker (who was then married to the televangelist Jim Bakker) urged her audience to be governed by compassion rather than intolerance and fear.“How sad,” she said, “that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, and we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.”The PTL network had an audience of millions, and in the years since, that interview has been credited with helping to change at least some viewers’ perceptions of gay people, AIDS and faith. Some televangelists had been implying or stating outright that AIDS was divine retribution for homosexuality. Ms. Bakker (who after a divorce and remarriage was later known as Tammy Faye Messner) called on Christians to instead show empathy.Among those impressed with her stand, many years later, was the actress Jessica Chastain, who won an Oscar last year for her role as Ms. Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” in which the interview with Mr. Pieters, portrayed by Randy Havens, was a pivotal scene. (A stage musical, “Tammy Faye,” which opened last year in London, also incorporated the 1985 interview.)“That interview was why I needed to make the movie,” Ms. Chastain told Variety at the movie’s New York premiere in 2021. “It was rebellious and brave and courageous and badass. I’m 100 percent convinced that there were people — conservative Christians watching at home — who realized that they had judged their family members unlovingly. I’m convinced that that interview saved families and saved lives.”If Ms. Bakker defied expectations with that interview, Mr. Pieters long defied AIDS, surviving for decades despite repeated health struggles. He died on July 8 at a hospital in Glendale, Calif., near Los Angeles. He was 70.His spokesman, Harlan Boll, said the cause was a sepsis infection.Mr. Pieters, who had continued his ministry and since 1994 had performed with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, was looking forward to the publication next year of his book, “Love Is Greater Than AIDS: A Memoir of Survival, Healing, and Hope.” In it, he said he was often asked why he thought he survived AIDS when so many others didn’t.“Whatever the reason,” he wrote, “I feel deeply grateful to be alive. So many gay men of my generation did not get to grow old. What a privilege to have reached the age of 70, still dancing with joy.”Albert Stephen Pieters was born on Aug. 2, 1952, in Lawrence, Mass. His father, Richard, was a mathematics teacher and wrestling coach at Phillips Academy, and his mother, Norma (Kenfield) Pieters, was a tax accountant and homemaker.“I knew that I was different from the time that I was about 3,” Mr. Pieters told Ms. Bakker in the 1985 interview, “and I grew up feeling like I didn’t quite fit in.”When he was a teenager, he said, he recognized that he was gay and talked to his pastor at a Congregational church about it.“He was freaked out,” he said. “He told me, ‘Don’t tell anybody; never say anything to anybody about it.’”He said that after graduating from Northwestern University in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in speech, he joined the Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago and felt called to a ministry focused on gay people, that church’s main audience. He earned a master of divinity degree at McCormick Theological Seminary in 1979, then became pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Hartford, Conn., before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. There he took a post at the Metropolitan Community Church of North Hollywood and, in 1984, received a diagnosis of AIDS, although he had been showing symptoms as early as 1982.He faced numerous health problems over the years, but just being around to face them was something of a victory: He said he’d been told in 1984 that he wouldn’t live out that year. The next year he spoke before a task force on AIDS in Los Angeles convened by Mayor Tom Bradley and Ed Edelman, a county supervisor, urging officials not to write off those who had already been diagnosed.“If I had succumbed to the hopelessness I constantly hear about AIDS,” he said, “I might have given up and not lived to see 1985.”Mr. Pieters is survived by a brother.At the 2021 opening of “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” Mr. Pieters commented on the impact of his 1985 interview.“I’ve had so many people over the years come up to me and say, ‘I saw your interview live, because my mother always had PTL on, and it changed my life because I realized I could be gay and Christian at the same time,’” he said. “Or, ‘It changed my life because I realized that AIDS was a reality, and I had to start taking care of myself.’”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Jane Birkin, Singer, Actress and Fashion Inspiration, Dies at 76

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      She was a lithe beauty of 1960s European film, a famous musical collaborator and lover of Serge Gainsbourg, and the namesake of elegant Hermès handbags.Jane Birkin, who helped define chic female sexuality of the 1970s as an actress in arty and erotic European movies and in her relationship — equal parts romantic and artistic — with the singer Serge Gainsbourg, died on Sunday in Paris. Ms. Birkin, who later became known for inspiring one of the best known lines of luxury handbags, was 76.Her death was confirmed by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who called her “a French icon” in a message on Twitter. The French news media reported that Ms. Birkin had been found dead at her home but that the cause was not immediately known.The child of a famously beautiful actress and a socially connected British naval officer, Ms. Birkin led a life guided by many happy accidents.While she was on a flight in 1984, a plastic bag in which she was keeping her possessions broke, leading her to complain aloud that Hermès did not make a bag that could fit all her things. The man sitting next to her happened to be Jean-Louis Dumas, then the head designer of Hermès (and later its chief executive). The company released the Birkin bag line the same year — in just the large size she had requested.Standard Birkin bags now sell for $10,000, and the difficulties of obtaining one — given a complex manufacturing process and a deliberately rationed supply to boutiques — have given the bag the cachet of exclusivity.Her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg began just as fortuitously, in 1968. She was in her early 20s, her first marriage having fallen apart, when, without particular renown as an actress and without speaking a word of French, she managed to be cast in a French movie, “Slogan,” starring Mr. Gainsbourg.The two fell in love, but Ms. Birkin did not see a way to remain long in France. Then, dining out one night, she had a chance encounter with the French director Jacques Deray, got hired to act in a movie of his, stayed in the country and solidified her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg.She lived in France for the rest of her life, and her engagement with Mr. Gainsbourg and his music proved equally enduring.The most notable product of their collaboration and romance was their 1969 hit recording of Mr. Gainsbourg’s song “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (“I Love You… Me Neither”).In the song, a duet, Mr. Gainsbourg speaks of sex in a low, conversational voice as Ms. Birkin confesses her love in suggestive murmurs and moans and the high-pitched singing of an ingénue.The song was condemned by the Vatican and banned in several countries and by the B.B.C. television network. But it sold millions of copies.Nearly 50 years later, in 2018, Ms. Birkin was still singing music by Mr. Gainsbourg, by then on a world tour of orchestral versions of his songs.“If I am singing in Argentina in two weeks’ time,” she told The Guardian, “it is because of ‘Je t’aime.’”Jane Mallory Birkin was born in London on Dec. 14, 1946, to Judy Campbell, an actress who gained renown for performing for British troops with Noël Coward during World War II, and Cmdr. David Birkin of the Royal Navy.In 2021, her father’s exploits during World War II were recounted in “A Dangerous Enterprise,” a book by Tim Spicer, a former British military officer. Commander Birkin’s duties included navigating boats on moonless nights across the English Channel to bring to safety Allied spies, stranded airmen and escaped prisoners of war who had found themselves in France.Ms. Birkin, at 18, married the British composer John Barry, known for arranging the trademark theme to James Bond movies, and they had a daughter, Kate. At 20, Ms. Birkin appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s hit 1966 movie, “Blow Up,” an erotic tale of a London fashion photographer. She played a fashion model — the credits listed her as only The Blonde — and gained some attention for a risqué nude scene.Ms. Birkin with the English actor David Hemmings in a scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow-Up,” released in 1966.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images“Had it all worked out with John Barry, I would never have been curious to know what was going on anywhere else,” Ms. Birkin told The Guardian in 2017. “I would have just gone on being his wife. I would have been delighted. But because he went off with someone else, and I was left with Kate, I had to find a job quite fast.”That led to her audition for “Slogan.”The movie that kept her in France was “La Piscine” (“The Swimming Pool”), starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. (It found unexpected renewed popularity in the United States in 2021.) A sun-soaked film of sex and jealousy with many shots of scantily clad actors, the movie proved to be an effective showcase for Ms. Birkin’s long-limbed beauty.Her romance with Mr. Gainsbourg captivated the French public. She was the young doe-eyed expat, he the aging but still virile artistic genius. The relationship lasted for more than a decade, ending when she left him in the early 1980s for the French film director Jacques Doillon. Mr. Gainsbourg died in 1991 at 62.Though Ms. Birkin would later speak self-deprecatingly about her role as Mr. Gainsbourg’s muse, she embraced becoming “the keeper of the Gainsbourg flame,” as The New York Times labeled her in 2018.She described to The Times connections between the music he wrote for her and work by classical composers like Chopin and Brahms.“I would have thought that he was probably France’s most modern writer,” she said. “He invented a new language, he cut words in two like Cole Porter.”Ms. Birkin and Mr. Gainsbourg with her daughters Charlotte, left, and Kate Barry in 1972. Charlotte became a singer and actress. Kate became a photographer who died in 2013.James Andanson/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMs. Birkin released “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…,” her first album of her own songs written in English, in 2021. “The results are an emotional tour de force from an artist who has never gotten her musical due outside of France,” the music writer Ben Cardew wrote in a review for Pitchfork.Ms. Birkin also continued to act, including in films by Agnès Varda and plays by Patrice Chéreau. She was also popular in France as an activist for women’s and L.G.B.T.Q. rights as well as for her British accent when speaking French, which the French found endearing.“The most Parisian of the English has left us,” the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, wrote in a message on Twitter on Sunday. “We will never forget her songs, her laughs and her incomparable accent.”Ms. Birkin in 2021 at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Hermès put her name on a line of exclusive handbags.Stephane Cardinale/Corbis, via Getty ImagesMs. Birkin had a mild stroke in 2021 and had recently canceled a series of concerts because of health issues.She is survived by two daughters, one with Mr. Gainsbourg and the other with Mr. Doillon: the singer-actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, each of whom has, like their mother, inspired designers and followers of fashion. Her other daughter, Kate Barry, a photographer, died at 46 in 2013 in a fall from a window of her fourth-floor Paris apartment.Ms. Birkin discovered that her romantic separation from Mr. Gainsbourg did not dim their collaboration. He kept writing new songs intended for her until he died.After their breakup, “you could talk back to him for once,” she told The Guardian. “You were not just his creation any more.”Guy Trebay More

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      André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

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      One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.His own arrival in the spotlight was auspicious. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally televised series of Young People’s Concerts.Mr. Bernstein was effusive as he introduced the young pianist to the crowd at Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto in such a way that we simply flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said, recounting the young pianist’s audition.Mr. Watts was then living in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a beat-up piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a bona fide star.A couple weeks later, Mr. Bernstein invited him to make his formal Philharmonic debut, substituting for the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”“It was like being God Almighty at 16,” he told The Times.André Watts was born on June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of Herman Watts, a noncommissioned officer stationed overseas for the U.S. Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.His mother, who was fond of playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he took up the piano after a flirtation with the violin.“I liked the sound,” he recalled in a 1993 television appearance. “I would hold the pedal down for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”When he was 8, the family moved to the United States for his father’s work, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship grew strained, and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the following decades.His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as teacher, coach and manager, and she enforced a strict practice regimen.Mr. Watts with Leonard Bernstein in 1963 after he performed a Liszt piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic as a last-minute substitute for Glenn Gould. Mr. Watts later credited Mr. Bernstein with handing him a career “out of thin air.”Associated PressAndré struggled to fit in at school, quarreling with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither Black nor white.When he went to Florida as a teenager to perform, his manager, invoking the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed suspiciously.But his mother told him that he should not blame racism for his troubles. “If someone is not nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalled her saying when he was interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t have to be automatically because of your color.”“These kinds of advice have taught me that when I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it is a racial thing,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are, first of all, never provable as racist anyway. So it’s a waste of time.”He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, which had long been seen as the dominion of the white and wealthy. In introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert, Mr. Bernstein described his international heritage and said, “I love that kind of story.”In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts won a Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist. Despite his early success, he tried to remain grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass away,” taken from a poem by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase inscribed on a gold medallion that he wore around his neck.)He graduated in 1972 from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he studied with the pedagogue and performer Leon Fleisher. He was already a regular on the global concert circuit by the time he graduated, playing the Liszt concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, before sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere.Mr. Watts in performance with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 2005.Richard Termine for The New York TimesMr. Watts earned mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could sometimes get carried away. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate from the keyboard.“He has that kind of personal magic that makes an Event of a concert, and Philharmonic Hall had the electric feeling that occurs only when an important artist is at work,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times wrote in 1970. “It cannot be taught, this mysterious transmission from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it in very large measure.”While Mr. Watts thrived on the stage, recording was more of a challenge; he said he was prone to clam up without an audience. And at times he suffered financial and management difficulties, including in 1992, when he was ordered by a New York State appellate court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making frequent appearances on television and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He grew fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and he began to study Zen Buddhism.In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing gently and listening to sounds makes everything slowly seem all right.”His collaborators described him as a musician of preternatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intent on finding fresh meaning each time.“Every night was a new adventure,” Mr. Spano said. “He radiated love to people and to the music, and it was unmistakable. That’s why he was so loved as a performer, because of the generosity of his music making.”He was also a role model for many Black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts’s at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts had taught since 2004, recalled him as a devoted teacher who was eager to “hand down this ferociousness about trying to become better.”“Whenever we were onstage together, there was this unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world where a lot of people think we shouldn’t be,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is Black. “It was an affirmation.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had been planning a feat: He would play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in a version that he had reworked for the right hand (his left was recovering from a nerve injury). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he got daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that emerged outside his home in Bloomington.Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concerto because of health problems and the pandemic. He mostly stopped playing the piano after the concerts were canceled, instead spending time with students.His wife said that music had sustained him throughout his life, beginning with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played, then he was happy. It just really lifted up his soul.”He described music as a sacred space in which he felt he could breathe and flourish.“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing that you have, and it is, in the sense of private and sacred, something that you need to protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. “The dross of everyday life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you need to protect your special relationship with your music.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Rick Froberg, Singer of Artful Intensity, Is Dead at 55

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      A longtime linchpin of a 1990s underground music scene, he built a devoted and enthusiastic following and was also a prolific visual artist.Rick Froberg, the vocalist and guitarist best known for his work with the influential 1990s post-hardcore band Drive Like Jehu, whose urgent howl was one of rock’s most distinctive voices, died on June 30 in San Diego. He was 55.His partner, Britton Neubacher, said the cause was an undiagnosed heart condition.Mr. Froberg, a beloved linchpin of the San Diego underground music scene that flourished in the 1980s and ’90s, sang in a raspy roar that segued smoothly between snarl and scream. “He always wanted to effortlessly sound kick-ass,” said John Reis, Mr. Froberg’s longtime bandmate and songwriting partner in the bands Pitchfork, Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes.Mr. Froberg particularly loved the gnarled growls of the Australian vocalists Bon Scott of AC/DC — his favorite band — and Chris Bailey of the proto-punk Saints, and he strived to follow them, Mr. Reis said. “I would tell him, ‘Dude, you have that in spades, and you actually have another gear those people don’t have.’”Mr. Froberg and Mr. Reis met as teenagers in 1986, at a picnic organized by a local anarchist publication at a San Diego park. They bonded immediately and soon joined up in Pitchfork, with Mr. Froberg on vocals. The band was inspired, Mr. Reis said, by the noisy music being issued at the time on independent labels like Dischord, Touch & Go and SST. By the time Pitchfork’s debut album was released in 1990, however, the band had broken up.Mr. Froberg and Mr. Reis quickly regrouped in Drive Like Jehu, where Mr. Froberg also began playing guitar, inspired by Sonic Youth’s atonal, unorthodox guitar tunings — which “made it seem like you could just do anything you wanted to do,” Mr. Froberg said in a recent web interview.Drive Like Jehu’s two albums featured dissonant, tightly coiled compositions with off-kilter rhythms and cathartic explosions. The group built a small but fervent following, with the enthusiasm it inspired far outstripping its record sales. The band’s single “Bullet Train to Vegas”/“Hand Over Fist,” a marvel of feral intensity and relentless locomotive force released by Merge Records in 1992, was described by the author Nabil Ayers in a recent Substack post as “arguably the best 7-inch single ever to be released.” A tribute to Mr. Froberg on the Merge website called it “one of the most revered in our catalog.”Mr. Reis soon became busy touring with another of his bands, Rocket From the Crypt, and Drive Like Jehu fizzled out after its second album, “Yank Crime.” Released on Interscope, it was Mr. Froberg’s only recording for a major label.Mr. Froberg was also a prolific visual artist. His artwork gradually evolved from fliers, posters and album covers into silk-screened graphics, linocut etchings and gouache paintings. He had three solo exhibitions, most recently at Trash Lamb Gallery in San Diego in 2022, and his work was included in over a dozen group shows.He moved to Brooklyn in 1998 and pursued a career as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer; he also had a stint doing animation with the artist Gary Panter. His illustrations were published in The New Yorker and The New York Times; Matt Dorfman, a Times art director who worked with Mr. Froberg, described his style as “a hysterical pastiche of 1920s surrealism and Tex Avery cartoons.”Eric Gerald Froberg was born on Jan. 19, 1968, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Eric and Sylvia (Phillips) Froberg. His father, a business consultant and entrepreneur, legally changed the Swedish family name from Froberg to Farr in 1979; Mr. Froberg used the ancestral surname professionally, though he sometimes signed his artwork “Rick Farr” or “Rick Fork.”His parents divorced soon after his birth, and he never had a relationship with his birth mother, who died in 1992. His father married Lynne Wacker, a sales training manager for Hooked on Phonics, in 1973. The family lived in Glendale and Playa del Rey before moving to Carlsbad when Mr. Froberg was 8. He lived primarily in the North County area of San Diego until he moved to Brooklyn.He married Amelia Halverson in 2003. They divorced in 2015. In addition to Ms. Neubacher, he is survived by his father, his stepmother and three younger brothers, Christopher, Justin and Gregory.In 1999 Mr. Reis formed a new band, Hot Snakes. Dissatisfied with his own vocals, he sent a cassette to Mr. Froberg, who agreed to join even though they lived on different coasts. In contrast to Drive Like Jehu’s distortion, Hot Snakes favored a clean guitar sound and short, efficient tunes, Mr. Reis said, “letting Rick’s voice and the attack of the pick carry the power.”Mr. Froberg also sang and played guitar from 2006 to 2015 in the Brooklyn band Obits, which released three albums on Sub Pop. The name was Mr. Froberg’s idea, said Sohrab Habibion, Obits’ other guitarist, a comment on ageism in music.Painters, photographers and filmmakers can grow old, Mr. Habibion said, “and jazz musicians and classical players are allowed to get long in the tooth. But rock ’n’ roll is stuck in this youth culture rut, so we wanted to put a stake in the ground and say that middle-aged people could make rock music that was relevant, vital and worthy of being part of the cultural conversation.”Drive Like Jehu reunited in 2014 for an outdoor concert at Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park in San Diego, attracting a crowd estimated to be the biggest since Theodore Roosevelt delivered an address there in 1915. “Intoxicated by the high of that day,” Mr. Reis said, the band later reconvened to tour.After moving back to San Diego in 2021, Mr. Froberg collaborated with Ms. Neubacher, a botanical artist, on large-scale installations at the San Diego Museum of Art and at Mothership, a space-themed tiki bar. “Watching him get lost in the secret places of his imagination was a daily pleasure of mine,” Ms. Neubacher said.Mr. Froberg had recently been working on what would have been Hot Snakes’ fifth studio album. “He was really firing on all cylinders,” Mr. Reis said. “His voice gave me a lot of freedom as a songwriter, because I didn’t have to worry about where the chorus or the melody was. I could go wildly off into what I considered uncharted territory for myself, and always knew that he would make sense of it and turn it into something beautiful.“I’m just lost without him,” he added. “I don’t know what to do now.” More

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      Ellen Hovde, ‘Grey Gardens’ Documentarian, Dies at 97

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      She worked with the Maysles brothers on the groundbreaking film about two Long Island recluses, and she later shared an Emmy for a mini-series about Ben Franklin.Ellen Hovde, a documentarian who was one of the directors of “Grey Gardens,” the groundbreaking 1975 movie that examined the lives of two reclusive women living in a deteriorating mansion on Long Island and inspired both a Broadway musical and an HBO film, died on Feb. 16 at her home in Brooklyn. She was 97.Her death, which had not been widely reported, was confirmed last week by her children, Tessa Huxley and Mark Trevenen Huxley, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Hovde (pronounced HUV-dee) worked on several films with the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, in the late 1960s and ’70s, when they were expanding the documentary form with cinéma vérité techniques, eschewing sit-in-a-chair interviews in favor of recording life and events as they happened.In 1969 she was a contributing editor on “Salesman,” a documentary by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin that followed four salesmen as they peddled $49.95 Bibles door to door in New England and Florida. The next year she was an editor on “Gimme Shelter,” the documentary by the Maysleses and Ms. Zwerin that captured a Rolling Stones tour, including the concert at Altamont Speedway in Northern California in late 1969 at which a concertgoer was killed by a Hells Angel.In 1974 she was credited as a director, along with the Maysleses, on “Christo’s Valley Curtain,” which was about an environmental art project the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude erected in Colorado in 1972. That film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary short.The mother and daughter known as Big Edie and Little Edie Beale in a scene from the documentary “Grey Gardens,” directed by Alfred and David Maysles, Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer.Criterion CollectionThe next year came “Grey Gardens.” That film, which garnered considerable attention at the time and in 2010 was named to the National Film Registry of culturally significant movies, took a close-up, often uncomfortable look at the lives of Edie Beale and her mother, Edith Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who had dropped out of high society and were living in East Hampton, N.Y., in a crumbling mansion along with assorted cats and raccoons.The film came about somewhat by accident when Lee Radziwill, Ms. Onassis’ sister, suggested that the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde make a documentary about her childhood. Among the people she suggested they talk to were the Beales — Little Edie and Big Edie, as they were known. The documentary Ms. Radziwill had suggested fell through, but the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde were intrigued by the Beales and proposed a film to them.“Big Edie didn’t really want to do it at first,” Ms. Hovde said in a 1978 interview with Film Quarterly. “Little Edie did.”Soon Muffie Meyer, who would partner with Ms. Hovde on numerous films in the ensuing years, joined the project. Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer received directing credits on the film along with the Maysles brothers, but they, in addition to Susan Froemke, were also its editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.“The person who is doing the editing is doing something very like a mix of writing and stage directing,” she told Film Quarterly. “That person is shaping, forming and structuring the material, and making the decisions about what is really going to be there on the screen — what the ideas are, what the order of events will be, where the emphasis will be.”For “Grey Gardens,” that involved going through dozens of hours of film and shaping a portrait that revealed the codependent relationship between the two eccentric women. Ms. Meyer said that, if portable cameras and tape recorders made the type of filmmaking used in “Grey Gardens” possible, the other crucial element was the editing.“Essentially, massive amounts of footage (usually upwards of 60 hours), unscripted and with little or no direction, was dumped in the editing room,” she said by email. “The editor’s job was to screen it, organize it, take careful notes, and then find the story and the structure. Ellen was a master at all of this, and there are not many masters (Charlotte Zwerin was another).”The team behind “Grey Gardens,” clockwise from top left: David Maysles, Ms. Hovde, Albert Maysles, Susan Froemke and Ms. Meyer. Ms. Hovde, Ms. Froemke and Ms. Meyer were the film’s editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal role.Marianne Barcellona“Grey Gardens” drew both acclaim and disapproval from critics. The film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time.” But in The New York Times, Richard Eder, while acknowledging that there was “no doubt about the artistry and devotion” involved in making the film, said that “the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter.”The debate over whether “Grey Gardens” and other films in the same style exploit their subjects or invade their privacy has been an ongoing one, and there was a chorus of such complaints when the movie was released. But Ms. Hovde, in the Film Quarterly interview, said the Beales themselves disputed that interpretation.“In the months when there was a lot of controversy about it,” she said, “it was Mrs. Beale and Edie who called us and said: ‘You know there has been this criticism — don’t worry. It’s all right. We know that it is an honest picture. We believe in it. We don’t want you to feel upset.’ That was their attitude, and they never wavered from that.”A musical based on the documentary opened on Broadway in 2006 and won three Tony Awards, and in 2009 HBO’s “Grey Gardens” movie, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Beales, won six Emmy Awards.In 1978 Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer formed Middlemarch Films, which went on to make scores of documentary features and videos in various styles and on a wide range of subjects. Some explored subjects from the age before film and photography and used actors to re-create scenes. One of those, a television mini-series about Benjamin Franklin directed jointly by Ms. Meyer and Ms. Hovde in 2002, won an Emmy for outstanding nonfiction special.Ms. Meyer said that in those types of projects, Ms. Hovde was a stickler for accuracy.“One example was her insistence on the accuracy of the bird tweets and frog sounds in our colonial-period films,” she said. “She drove the sound editors to distraction (and in one late-night session, to tears): ‘Was this frog endemic to the Northeast and did it croak in late fall?’ ‘Was this bird tweet that was added to the soundtrack really a bird that could be found in Virginia in the 18th century?’”Richard Easton was one of two actors who played the title role in “Benjamin Franklin,” an Emmy-winning PBS mini-series directed by Ms. Hovde and Muffie Meyer that used actors to re-create historical scenes.PBS, via Associated PressEllen Margerethe Hovde was born on March 9, 1925, in Meadville, Pa. Her father, Brynjolf (known as Bryn), was president of the New School for Social Research from 1945 to 1950, and her mother, Theresse (Arneson) Hovde, was a nurse.Ms. Hovde grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a degree in theater in 1947 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after which she studied for a time at the University of Oslo. In 1950 she married Matthew Huxley, son of the author Aldous L. Huxley. The marriage ended in divorce, but Ms. Hovde’s son said that she and Aldous Huxley remained close until his death in 1963, and that as his eyesight began to fail, she would sometimes read books into a tape recorder for him.Ms. Hovde had hoped for a career as a stage director, but, after not finding work, she took a job as an administrative assistant at a film school. By the early 1950s she was learning editing. Her credits before she began working with the Maysles brothers included editing “Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal” (1968) for the New York public television station WNET and a Simon and Garfunkel television special broadcast on CBS in 1969.Ms. Hovde’s second marriage, to Adam Edward Giffard in 1963, also ended in divorce. In addition to her children, she is survived by two grandchildren.Ms. Meyer said Ms. Hovde’s homes were gathering places for documentarians in the 1970s, and she once helped organize a filmmakers’ cookbook, a photocopied collection of everyone’s favorite recipes.“Most of us still use it,” she said. More

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      in Theater

      Jack Goldstein, a Savior of Broadway Theaters, Dies at 74

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      He helped secure landmark status for more than two dozen theaters in the 1980s, then initiated the design competition that led to a new TKTS booth.Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, N.Y., in Putnam County. He was 74.The cause was a heart attack, said Tom Miller, his executor.Over 30 years, Mr. Goldstein established himself as an effective behind-the-scenes player on Broadway.He was the executive director of the nonprofit Save the Theaters, which was formed to prevent the future destruction of playhouses. He was an executive at Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union, and with the Theater Development Fund, where he initiated the design competition that led to the creation of a new TKTS discount ticket booth in Duffy Square, topped with a dramatic cascade of 27 ruby-red structural glass steps that rises above West 47th Street.“Jack had a great artistic eye and a deep commitment to good government,” Gretchen Dykstra, the former president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, said in a phone interview.Mr. Goldstein arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1982, during a difficult financial period for Broadway andaround the time of the wrenching demolition of the Helen Hayes and Morosco Theaters — the most distinctive of the five theaters between West 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway that were leveled to make way for the towering New York Marriott Marquis Hotel.The sites of the Hayes and Morosco Theaters had become the center of protests by actors, playwrights and others until the wrecking balls began swinging that March.The actor Jason Robards speaking at a rally in 1982 in an unsuccessful effort to preserve the Morosco Theater. Others on the platform included the actor Christopher Reeve, second from left. Mr. Goldstein joined the Broadway preservation effort that year. Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesMr. Goldstein told a conference at the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan in 2014, “The destruction in the center of Broadway of beloved, important and, from the actors’ point of view, irreplaceable instruments of their art form and communication, was an affront.”Mr. Goldstein, who had a background in historic preservation, was initially a volunteer with the Committee to Save the Theaters, which had been formed by Actors’ Equity. He soon shifted to join and then run its spinoff organization, Save the Theaters.“Since it was clear that the city no longer recognized the value of the Broadway theaters,” he told Metropolis, an architecture and design magazine, in 2004, “No. 1 on the agenda was to bring to bear whatever legal disincentives to demolition were available and apply them to the historic theaters.”For six years, Mr. Goldstein and other preservationists focused on getting protection for theaters from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which might be designated landmarks. He brought actors to the commission’s hearings to impart their knowledge of the theaters. And he collaborated on a report with an architect, Hugh Hardy, that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail, as standards for landmark designation.Speaking to the Skyscraper conference, Mr. Goldstein cited, for example, the “spatial relationships and building techniques behind the walls” that allowed actors to speak without a microphone, or in a whisper, and be heard by 600 to 1,400 theatergoers.Workmen cutting away steel from the roof of the Helen Hayes Theater in 1982.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“He was well spoken and enormously energetic,” Kent Barwick, a former chairman of the landmarks commission, said in an interview. “He was doing what needed to be done at the time. Was he always right in his judgment? No. Was he always fair? No. Was he dramatic? Of course — he was coming out of Actors’ Equity.”In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks — some for their exteriors, some for their interiors, some for both. (The sale of the Mark Hellinger Theater to a church in 1991 brought the group to 27.) The city’s Board of Estimate, a powerful governing body at the time, approved the designations in March 1988.Theater owners objected to the landmarking “as a confiscation of the value of the building because it limited its use to live theater,” Rocco Landesman, a former president of Jujamcyn Theaters, said by phone. He said of the buildings: “You couldn’t tear them down, and it was difficult to build above them if you didn’t have the rights. Value was taken without compensation.”The owners sued to overturn the landmarking of 22 of the theaters, but in 1992 the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case after the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division had upheld the designations.Mr. Goldstein in 1997. Looking back with satisfaction in 2014, he said he thought he had made an impact on Broadway. “I feel, ‘job done,’” he said.TDFJack Lewis Goldstein was born on March 5, 1949, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Joseph, was an Army officer and a physician whose work took him and his family to Maryland, Germany and other postings. His mother, Thelma (Ginsberg) Goldstein, was a homemaker, potter and political activist. The couple eventually divorced.Jack’s maternal grandmother took him to his first Broadway show, Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver!,” which opened at the Imperial Theater in 1963.“‘Oliver!’ was the first time I experienced that suspension of disbelief,” Mr. Goldstein told Crain’s New York Business in 1998. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Goldstein graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1972. He worked in Manhattan at the National Design Center, which exhibited home furnishings, before moving to Washington, where he was an assistant to the director of programs at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a small federal agency that would play a role in persuading him to go to Broadway.While he was in Washington, the Interior Department, responding to a petition from preservationists, determined that the Morosco was eligible to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, and that if the developer of the Marriott Marquis wanted to tear it down, the company would need a waiver from the advisory council. Mr. Goldstein contended in an affidavit that Lyn Nofziger, an aide to President Ronald Reagan, had told the council to grant the waiver or lose its government funding — an assertion Mr. Nofziger denied.Frustrated, Mr. Goldstein soon left Washington to join the Broadway preservationists, whose efforts to save the Morosco were by then doomed to fail.After leaving Save the Theaters in 1988, Mr. Goldstein was a special assistant for government affairs to Ron Silver, the actor and president of Actors’ Equity, and the project director of the Broadway Initiatives Working Group, which was formed to evaluate Broadway’s future. He was the executive director of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, which makes theater more affordable and accessible, from 1998 to 2001.When he announced the competition to design a new TKTS booth in 1999, Mr. Goldstein recognized how beloved and important the slapdash, pipe-and-canvas structure had become to theatergoers over 26 years. But, as he told The New York Times, “time and weather have taken their toll.”The new TKTS booth was not completed until 2008, a year before Mr. Goldstein returned to Actors’ Equity as its national director of governance policy and support.In 2012, he became an antiques dealer in Cold Spring. He previously owned a seasonal antiques store in Rehoboth, Del.He is survived by a brother, Leonard.Mr. Goldstein acknowledged that he had made an impact on Broadway.“I think I’ve made a contribution when I walk through Times Square and see theaters filled — many would have been swept away,” he told The Highlands Current of Cold Spring in 2014. “I feel, ‘job done.’” More

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      in Music

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

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