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      Two Pianists Make a Life Out of an Intimate Art Form

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      Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, partners onstage and off, began to play as a duo in school. Now, they are dedicating their careers to it.It looked like some kind of grand music exam. The pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy sat down at their instruments onstage at Wigmore Hall and began to play for an audience of two.The rest of their listeners were online. It was June 2020, and Kolesnikov and Tsoy were, like virtually every other musician at that time, playing a livestreamed concert. Despite the hall’s chilly emptiness, there was something heartening: Here were two musical and romantic partners sharing a bit of their domestic lives as they worked through a messy pile of sheet music spread out on a single Steinway piano.Now, things are more or less back to normal. When they sat for an interview at their elegant northwest London home recently, Kolesnikov had just returned from Copenhagen as a replacement soloist in Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto, and was about to jump in — in Copenhagen again — to play Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. (He could be heard frantically recapping the piece as he walked down the street. “It’s not something you can just pull out of your pocket,” he said.)The pandemic forced Kolesnikov, 34, and Tsoy, 35, to recalibrate. After so much time spent at home together, returning meaningfully to the genre of four-hands music — through which they had met — they emerged with a desire to dedicate themselves to playing as a duo. They signed to new management as both solo artists and partners last October, and will make their duo debut at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 13, with their first album together to follow this summer.“I consider this possibly the hardest form of chamber music,” Kolesnikov said of the piano duet. “This genre is a very interesting merge of something that is extremely homely, extremely intimate and private. Then one thinks, how do you take that onstage?”A Domestic Art FormThe piano duet has always been closely tethered to the home. Grove Music describes it as a “modest, essentially domestic branch of music,” more frequently associated with a student’s early experiences than with the public-facing openness of a concert hall.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Welcome to Japan, Taylor Swift Fans. Please Remain Seated as You Cheer.

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      Some Japanese spectators are grumbling that foreign concertgoers visiting Tokyo don’t share their rather restrained local approach to taking in a show.Taylor mania has landed in Tokyo. But the enthusiasm of some of the Swifties arriving with her has clashed with local sensibilities.Thousands of visitors from across Asia and beyond have flooded into Japan’s capital as Taylor Swift performs at the Tokyo Dome for four nights this week. The problem, as some domestic concertgoers see it, is that these foreign fans don’t share the rather restrained Japanese approach to taking in a show.In a post on the platform X, a Japanese holder of a V.I.P. ticket wrote that even paying 130,000 yen — about $870 — and being seated in the third row didn’t guarantee a clear view, given that so many foreign fans had stood up.“It’s too sad,” the post said. “It’s crazy that, if you follow the rules, you won’t be able to watch it.”While Japanese are praised abroad for their pristine behavior at soccer matches and other sporting events, their exacting standards at home can make them hostile to visitors. Another post on X, accompanied by a short video of audience members hoisting up their cellphones to capture the scene onstage, complained that “there were many foreigners who couldn’t respect manners.”The grumbling is in some ways a microcosm of Japan’s mixed reception to the international tourists who have helped restore the country’s economy, the world’s third largest, after the pandemic. More than 25 million people visited Japan last year, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization, nearly 80 percent of the number who visited in 2019.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paul McCartney Talks About His Beatles Photos Coming to the Brooklyn Museum

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      Sixty years after the Beatles appeared live on “Ed Sullivan,” McCartney reflects on his photos capturing those halcyon days. The Brooklyn Museum will exhibit them, and some will be for sale later.They are now a collector’s trove — Paul McCartney’s own photos, shot 60 years ago, when the Beatles took Europe and America by storm: images of screaming fans (one carrying a live monkey); a girl in a yellow bikini; airport workers playing air guitar, and unguarded moments grabbed from trains, planes and automobiles.McCartney, now 81, doesn’t like to sit still and reminisce about the past, so he chatted while driving home from his recording studio in Sussex, England. ‘‘My American friends call these small, one-way lanes ‘gun barrels,’ ’’ he said, warning his interviewer that at any moment the signal might die (it did). In the end, it took two days to complete a coherent conversation about the breakthrough period when the Beatles went viral, captured in the traveling exhibition ‘‘Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-1964: Eyes of the Storm,’’ which features 250 of his shots. Currently it’s at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., and comes to the Brooklyn Museum May 3-August 18. (Don’t be surprised if the artist shows up for the opening.)It was McCartney’s archivist, Sarah Brown, who found 1,000 photographs the musician had taken over 12 weeks — from Dec. 7, 1963, to Feb. 21, 1964, — in the artist’s library.“I thought the photos were lost,’’ he said. ‘‘In the ’60s it was pretty easy. Often doors were left open. We’d invite fans in.” Even the recording studio wasn’t a safe space. “I was taking my daughter Mary to the British Library to show her where to research for her exams, and in one display case I saw the lyric sheet for ‘Yesterday,’” he said. A sticky fingered biographer had swiped the original from their studio.Rosie Broadley, a senior curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where the show was inaugurated, said, “His photographs show us what it was like to look through his eyes while the Beatles conquered the world.’’McCartney won an art prize at school and practiced photography with his brother, Mike (who later became a professional photographer). He graduated to a 35 mm SLR Pentax camera when the Beatles hit it big.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mojo Nixon, Who Mixed Roots and Punk Rock, Dies at 66

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      A self-styled voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird,” he was known for satirical songs including “Elvis Is Everywhere” and “Destroy All Lawyers.”Mojo Nixon, the psychobilly musician and radio host who gained cult status for his rabble rousing and celebrity spoofs like the 1987 hit “Elvis Is Everywhere”, died on Wednesday aboard a country music cruise that he was co-hosting. He was 66.His death was confirmed by Matt Eskey, the director of a 2020 documentary film about Mr. Nixon. He said that Mr. Nixon had a “cardiac event” while he was asleep as the Outlaw Country Cruise was docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico.A statement posted by the film’s official Facebook page said that Mr. Nixon had died “after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners.”Mr. Nixon was best known for his celebrity spoofs, like “Don Henley Must Die” and “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child,” and for satirical tirades like “I Hate Banks” and “Destroy All Lawyers.”“All of it was performed in maximum overdrive on a bed of rockabilly, blues, and R&B, which earned Nixon some friends in the roots rock community but had enough punk attitude — in its own bizarre way — to make him a college radio staple during his heyday,” the All Music Guide wrote.“I’m a rabble-rouser who does humorous social commentary within a rock-and-roll setting,” he told The New York Times in 1990. In another interview with the paper, he described himself as a voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      The Vocal Coach Who Keeps Broadway (and Patti LuPone) in Tune

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      “She saved my career,” Patti LuPone said of this indispensable vocal therapist and coach whose clients include Madonna and Billy Porter.For 41 years, Joan Lader has rented a slender studio apartment just west of Union Square in Manhattan. Through its door, a narrow entryway leads to a doll-size bathroom and an efficiency kitchen. In the main space, where a visitor might expect to find a bed, Lader has arranged the instruments of her trade — a piano, a keyboard, balance balls, straws, a box of tissues, a skeleton in a jaunty hat.Lader has never advertised, never solicited clients. But for two generations of Broadway stars, as well as dozens of opera singers and pop and rock luminaries, she remains an indispensable vocal therapist and vocal coach. She even received a Tony Award in 2016 for excellence in theater.And while proper breathing is fundamental to her practice, she has scarcely paused for breath since that award. She continues to work seven hours each day, seven days a week. (“I wish she would take a break,” Patti LuPone, a longtime student, told me.) For Lader, 77, the work is her calling, a synthesis of artistry, science and according to her clients and fans, something akin to magic.“I’ve called her a witch in front of people, many times,” the music director Rob Fisher said. “I’ve never seen anybody else do the hocus-pocus that she sometimes does.”The composer Tom Kitt can nearly always tell when a singer has been working with Lader. “They have opened up in the beautiful way,” he said. “They are empowered, and they feel confident.”I met Lader on a wintry afternoon last month. She had struggled to find time to see me, but a cancellation had opened a narrow window in her schedule. She showed me into her space, noting the eight-inch soundproofing along the wall that borders the apartment next door. “Cats” paid for that, she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love John Coltrane

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      Coltrane changed the game in American music a few times over. Here’s a guided tour to his career, courtesy of 15 musicians, scholars, poets, writers and other experts.Yes, it’s time for this series to focus on John Coltrane — perhaps the most sanctified musician in the whole Black American tradition, who other artists sometimes refer to simply as “St. John.”Born in Hamlet, N.C., and raised in High Point, Coltrane arrived on the New York scene in the 1950s, by way of Philadelphia and the Miles Davis Quintet. In the short years between that arrival and his death, in 1967, the world around Coltrane would change dramatically. He reached the peak of his creative forces as a saxophonist just as American society was bursting apart in the 1960s, and as freedom movements drummed colonialism out of the African continent. Though introspective and soft-spoken, singularly allergic to grandstanding, Coltrane felt powerfully concerned with the fate of the world, and he was sure that music had a role to play in turning the tides.He closely studied spiritual and musical systems from Africa and India, sensing that ancient, non-Western traditions might light the path toward a new creative approach. For many of his contemporaries, Trane’s saxophone became synonymous with a liberated mind and body. And, however ineffable, it carried a message. As A.B. Spellman wrote in a poem after the saxophonist’s death, “trane’s horn had words in it.”Coltrane changed the game in American music a few times over: first, with a style that felt like such a force of nature, one critic labeled it “sheets of sound,” as if he were commanding monsoon rains. Then, in 1960, the flipbook-fast harmonies of “Giant Steps” upped the expectations for jazz improvisers by a big margin. Swinging in the other direction, Trane brought his whirling-dervish attack to a more stationary style of music: raga-like, harmonically planted “modal” tunes such as “Impressions,” “Africa” and “India.”In the mid-60s, compelled by his own spirituality, by the outward-bound “free jazz” being made by artists like Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, and by the music he’d been playing at home with his second wife, the pianist and composer Alice (McLeod) Coltrane, the saxophonist wrote and recorded his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme.” A paean to God, it also sounds like an attempt to unleash purifying flames on a world gone wrong. And from there, he went even further; his last two years saw Coltrane pushing rhythm and tone beyond their breaking points.Below you’ll find a guided tour of Coltrane’s career, courtesy of 15 musicians, scholars, poets, writers and other experts whose lives have been cleansed, and made brighter, by the sheets of sound.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Where Has Tracy Chapman Been? Her Grammys Triumph Has Fans Wondering

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      Her triumphant performance at the Grammy Awards left fans wondering what she has been doing since she left the music world, and whether she might return.Tracy Chapman’s rare public appearance at the Grammy Awards on Sunday night — where she practically stole the show performing her 1988 song “Fast Car” with the country singer Luke Combs — left many fans wondering why she had largely stepped away from music for more than a decade.Despite some scattered performances on television and at awards shows, Chapman, 59, has remained almost entirely absent from the music world in recent years, having released her last studio album in 2008 and done her last tour in 2009. Since she first emerged in the late 1980s, she has always been known as a reclusive and private figure.“Being in the public eye and under the glare of the spotlight was, and it still is, to some extent, uncomfortable for me,” she told The Irish Times in 2015. “There are some ways by which everything that has happened in my life has prepared me for this career. But I am bit shy.”The acclaim for her Grammys performance — Taylor Swift could be seen singing along in the crowd — was a sign of how beloved Chapman remains. Combs’s note-for-note cover of “Fast Car” went to No. 2 on Billboard’s pop singles chart last year, and after the Grammys, Chapman’s original began shooting up iTunes’s download chart.After her debut LP, “Tracy Chapman,” was released in 1988 — and went to No. 1 on the Billboard chart — she released seven more studio albums. Her last, “Our Bright Future,” came out in 2008. Jon Pareles of The New York Times described it as a collection of “morose love songs” as well as “her latest utopian vision of a world without war or greed.”Chapman performed at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012. Kevin Wolf/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Grammys 2024 Takeaways: Taylor Swift Makes History in a Big Night for Women

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      Women thoroughly dominated the 66th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, with a history-making album of the year win by Taylor Swift and victories by Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, SZA, Lainey Wilson, the Colombian pop star Karol G and the band boygenius.The wins capped a year when women were extraordinarily successful in pop music, and also signified a change for the Grammys, which have frequently been criticized — as recently as five years ago — for overlooking female artists on the show.In addition to the wins, the show featured powerful performances by SZA, Eilish, Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo and even Joni Mitchell and Tracy Chapman — two godmothers of modern songwriting who have made only rare public appearances in recent years.In taking album of the year for “Midnights,” Swift became the first artist to win the Grammys’ top prize four times, beating a trio of male legends — Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon — who had three.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More