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      David Sanford’s Music Has Flown Under the Radar. It Shouldn’t.

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      Few composers have broader stylistic reach. But on a new album, “A Prayer for Lester Bowie,” he makes it all cohere.It’s not a big mystery why David Sanford’s energetic, well-crafted music has stayed mostly under the radar for the last three decades. “He’s not a self-promoter,” said the conductor Gil Rose, who brought out the first album devoted to Sanford’s orchestral music two years ago.Sanford, 58, cheerfully concedes the point. “Yes, you have to be able to market, which I’m atrocious at,” he said in a recent interview. “I’m trying to get better, well into my 50s.”As Rose put it, “He’s interested in his music, but he’s not going to beat anyone’s door down about it.”The irony is that Sanford’s work often has door-blasting power. Yet whether he’s writing for a chamber ensemble, a big band or an orchestra, his wildness never tips into indiscipline.Take “Alchemy,” the opening track on Sanford’s 2007 album “Live at the Knitting Factory,” played by his big band, which was known at the time as the Pittsburgh Collective. Merely the first minute balances a lot.There’s bebop-influenced brass writing to start things off. But other sections aren’t really swinging; instead, they suggest the blunt attack of American Minimalism. A broader swing feel is activated when the reed section kicks in, bringing with it the audible influence of Charles Mingus’s bands. Then the pulse drops away and we spend a few seconds in a Schoenberg-inflected harmonic world.It’s jazz — though there hasn’t yet been a sustained solo. It’s clearly in the contemporary classical tradition — though there’s also room for improvisation. (A scorching sax feature begins in the second minute.) Like the title promises, it’s a work of alchemy, in the tradition of composer-performers like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell.Growing up in a musical family in Pittsburgh, his mother a church organist and his father a sometime professional singer, Sanford discovered a love for big band around the same time he picked up the trombone. A 1991 Guggenheim fellowship led to some of the earliest compositions of his that have been recorded: “Chamber Concerto No. 3” and “Prayer: In Memoriam Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” both from 1992. Lodestars like Mingus and Sly and the Family Stone stayed with him through his student years, which culminated in a masters and doctorate from Princeton in the late 1990s.Most tunes on “Knitting Factory” date from a batch of material that Sanford composed around 2003, when he had his first sabbatical from a full-time teaching job at Mount Holyoke College. He also received the Rome Prize during that period, which gave him, he recalled, the “time to just basically do anything that I wanted.”Shortly after “Knitting Factory” was released, I heard Sanford conduct this band at the Miller Theater at Columbia University. I was convinced he was ready for a breakout. That never quite happened. But the moment may be here once again.That Sanford is finally doing better with the marketing thing is reflected by a name change for his long-running band. It’s now billed, sensibly enough, as the David Sanford Big Band on its sophomore release, “A Prayer for Lester Bowie,” released last month on the Greenleaf imprint. (The title composition is by Hugh Ragin, a veteran trumpeter with long ties to Sanford, as well as to Braxton and Mitchell.)On pieces like the compact yet multilayered “popit,” you can hear how Sanford might appeal to jazz, punk and contemporary classical listeners in equal measure. “Woman in Shadows” once again suggests the influence of Mingus, as well as of film noir scores.

      A Prayer For Lester Bowie by David SanfordAnother track, “subtraf,” reflects some of his more recent enthusiasms, including modernist European composers like Fausto Romitelli and Helmut Lachenmann. Like other Sanford pieces, it has a guitar fuzzbox kick that recalls electric-era Miles Davis. (Sanford’s dissertation at Princeton included an essay on Davis’s album “Agharta.”)Of Lachenmann’s “Mouvement,” which helped inspire “subtraf,” Sanford said: “It’s a larger chamber orchestra piece. And the use of colors there, I thought, OK, this is a different direction I was really kind of loving.”“I knew it would work as a format for improvisation,” he added.

      A Prayer For Lester Bowie by David SanfordHis musical knowledge and tool kit is about as broad as it gets. Other composers might bend your ear about the guitarist Pete Cosey, most famous for his work with Davis; Mingus’s somewhat obscure “Three Worlds of Drums,” which Sanford described as one of his three favorite pieces; and Lachenmann’s “Mouvement.” But few others can make those all influences cohere in the same piece.Discussing “Scherzo Grosso,” his early cello concerto for Matt Haimovitz, which exists in versions for his big band as well as traditional orchestra, Sanford remembers “quoting the living daylights out of stuff,” in the manner of bebop titans and Luciano Berio.“Back then,” Sanford said, “I kind of wanted to be Robert Rauschenberg.” But now he’s moved on to subtler forms of mixology.Jon Nelson, a trumpeter in the Meridian Arts Ensemble who also played on “Knitting Factory,” has had an opportunity to observe Sanford’s writing for chamber orchestra as well as for big band. Describing Sanford’s aesthetic as “a 360-degree universe,” Nelson added that “David’s music sounds like nothing else, yet when you hear it, memories of music you’ve heard in your life are triggered.”Haimovitz, another longtime collaborator, said by email: “I always wondered how is it that a composer who synthesizes Arnold Schoenberg, John Coltrane, Sergei Prokofiev, Charles Mingus, Jimi Hendrix and Wilco — and those are merely some of the less esoteric references — never sounds like he’s appropriating anyone else’s music.” (Haimovitz said that his own best guess involves Sanford’s “generously open ears, and a true genius.”)Of his recording of Sanford’s “Black Noise” — one of my favorite recordings of 2019 — Rose, the conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, said: “It’s not the longest CD we ever produced. But impact per minute, it’s maybe one of the strongest ones that we’ve done.”Rose added that he would love more big orchestral pieces from Sanford, who has plans for a piano concerto, among other potential projects. But Sanford added that, as a father of two and a professor with a full teaching load, “I definitely can’t write any more music than I’m writing.”That’s where greater name recognition might help, along with some more commissioning orchestras, and perhaps another sabbatical. In the meantime, Rose is willing to wait on Sanford, in part because this composer can justify the material in every bar of a piece.“Everything has a place and is there for a reason, and he can tell you why, too,” Rose said. “He’s thought through everything at the highest detailed level, but it sounds spontaneous. That’s rare.” More

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      The Velvet Underground Meets Its Match in Todd Haynes

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      In the director’s hands, music subjects are as much about their cultural moment as about their sound — a good description of the band led by Lou Reed.Todd Haynes said his music-related films are really about how “the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture.”By Mark Sommerfeld For The New York TimesTodd Haynes’s new documentary, “The Velvet Underground,” summons that band’s essence by being a feast for … the eyes. The screen is almost constantly split into self-contained images that are in conversation with each other, at times creating a dizzying sensory overload. Some of the most striking scenes use images shot by Andy Warhol, who was a crucial presence in the band’s life and art.“We licensed two and a half hours of moving images for a two-hour-long movie,” Haynes said, laughing, “and I think 45 minutes of that is probably Warhol movies alone.”Evoking a sound world by relying heavily on visuals might feel counterintuitive, but Haynes, 60, has never followed the predictable path. His 1991 feature debut, “Poison,” was a linchpin of that era’s New Queer Cinema movement, and since then he has maintained a stubbornly independent streak, from the prescient psychological horror of “Safe” (1995) to the lush lesbian romanticism of “Carol” (2015).Haynes’s queering is particularly effective in music-centric movies, a field that has often been dominated by a straight-male point of view.He burst on the scene in 1987 with the 43-minute-long biopic “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which was cast with dolls. In 2007 he made “I’m Not There,” with six actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing Bob Dylan, or at least versions of Dylan. Even Haynes’s contribution to the HBO omnibus “Six by Sondheim” (2013) departed from convention: Whereas an older female performer usually handles the “Follies” number “I’m Still Here,” he had the former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker croon it to a dimly lit cabaret full of women, a neat reversal of the male gaze.“The kinds of subjects I want to make films about are not just because it’s music I love,” Haynes said. “They’re about cultural moments where the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture. Or they set up an example of a unique — and usually in my mind radical — experiment where the artist succeeds in playing around with notions of identity through music and through performance.”The Velvet Underground members John Cale, left, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed in a scene from the documentary.  Nat Finkelstein/Apple TV+The Velvet Underground, the wildly influential 1960s-70s quartet led by Lou Reed, is a perfect illustration of that confluence. The problem is that unlike, say, the Beatles, the band did not leave much footage behind. Haynes turned that handicap into an artistic asset by zooming out instead of in. “I immediately made a decision that I wanted to focus on the time and place in New York City,” he said.The musicians had all been drawn into Warhol’s orbit early on, so Haynes talked to insightful members of the artist’s circle, like the actress Mary Woronov and the critic Amy Taubin. Tellingly, one of the most compelling witnesses is Jonas Mekas, the curator and experimental filmmaker who was interviewed shortly before his death in 2019.Haynes said that with his music-related projects, “I’m always trying to find the cinematic parallels or stylistic traditions that are relevant either to the time or to the spirit, the ethos of the music. And in this documentary I had handed to me, basically on a platter, this avant-garde cinema, which is so intrinsically bound up in the story of the Velvet Underground.”This approach has been a hallmark of Haynes’s music work. “He’s not looking at different mediums as separate entities but trying to integrate them together and create this synthesis of music and art and philosophy,” said Michael Stipe, the former R.E.M. frontman who was an executive producer on “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes’s 1998 feature about the glam-rock scene. “Because at the end of the day, really, he’s a philosopher,” Stipe continued.The Velvet Underground’s John Cale — who participated in the movie along with his bandmate Maureen Tucker — was familiar with the director’s work, and trusted the band’s legacy would be in the right hands. “I knew if anyone could pull together the historical artifacts and make them come to life, it was Todd,” Cale said in an email. “His ability to pull emotion from stills and ephemera is further testament to his true understanding of who we were and what we wanted to leave in this world.” (The band’s third surviving member, Doug Yule, declined to take part in the film.)Cale’s reference to emotion touches on an important Haynes trait. In interviews, the director speaks in heady, paragraph-long sentences, which might suggest an abstract, perhaps detached body of work. But his formally rigorous films are roiled by tempestuous feelings and emotions. If “Superstar” — which cannot be shown commercially because of a cease-and-desist order by the music rights’ holders — has a cult following, it is not because of its gimmick but because it is so unexpectedly affecting.On that project, “I was thinking about how to make a film that would follow narrative conventions so closely that an audience would find itself caught up emotionally,” Haynes said. “But it wouldn’t be because an actor is doing those things — it would be a doll.”Jonathan Rhys Meyers in “Velvet Goldmine,” one of several music-centric films Haynes has made.Peter Mountain/Miramax FilmsHe has explored the formation (and transformation) of identity in his music-related work, but also fandom and its attendant heightened expectations. Haynes has always been very conscious of such hopes — especially when they are based on gender and sexuality, an area in which rock has been simultaneously groundbreaking and retrograde.Maybe that’s why the musicians in Haynes’s movies draw heated responses from real-life viewers and other characters. The Carpenters were still widely derided as milquetoast soft rock for girls and housewives when “Superstar” came out, and the film helped lead a critical reappraisal of the duo in the early 1990s. Admiration and rejection partly based on the scrambling of gender roles feature prominently in “Velvet Goldmine” via the knotty relationship involving a journalist and a pair of flamboyant rockers — one inspired by David Bowie and the other an amalgam of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.It would be hard to find a more complicated figure than Reed, who left the Velvet Underground in 1970 and embarked on the fruitful solo career evoked in “Velvet Goldmine.” He was the kind of wildly creative, mercurial figure who is catnip to documentarians, and he is everywhere in the new film: a voice, either singing or heard in interviews; an unsmiling face staring us down; at times a presence felt more than seen.And yet even after those two hours, Reed, who died in 2013, remains an enigma, much like the Velvet Underground itself. Haynes did not call on critics or historians to venture theories or explain the band’s importance, and the closest we come to a musicological analysis is delivered by the eccentric Velvets protégé Jonathan Richman.Haynes said this was all by design. “There’s generations of people who could tell you how great the Velvet Underground are, how meaningful they were to my career as a musician or my career as an artist or whatever,” Haynes said. “But I thought, ‘Where do you stop? I don’t want a movie that tells you how great the band is: I want a movie that shows you how great they are, and then you figure that out.’” More

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      Paddy Moloney, Irish Piper Who Led the Chieftains, Dies at 83

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      The band he fronted for nearly 60 years toured the world, collaborated with rock stars and helped spark a renaissance for traditional Irish music.Paddy Moloney, the playful but disciplined frontman and bagpiper of the Chieftains, a band that was at the forefront of the worldwide revival of traditional Irish music played with traditional instruments, died on Monday in Dublin. He was 83.His daughter Aedin Moloney confirmed the death, at a hospital, but did not specify the cause.For nearly 60 years the Chieftains toured extensively, released more than two dozen albums and won six Grammy Awards. They were particularly known for their collaborations with artists like Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Nanci Griffith and Luciano Pavarotti.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.“Our music is centuries old, but it is very much a living thing,” Mr. Moloney told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “We don’t use any flashing lights or smoke bombs or acrobats falling off the stage.” He added, “We try to communicate a party feeling, and that’s something that everybody understands.”In 2012, when he was vice president, President Biden told People magazine that his desire was to sing “Shenandoah” with the Chieftains “if I had any musical talent.” He invited them to perform at his inauguration this year, but Covid-related restrictions kept them from traveling.“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996.Mr. Moloney was a master of many instruments: He played the uileann pipes (the national bagpipes of Ireland), the tin whistle, the bodhran (a type of drum) and the button accordion. He was also the band’s lead composer and arranger.Asked in 2010 on the NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me” what he thought was the sexiest instrument, he chose the pipes.“I often call it the octopus,” he said, “and so, I mean, that’s something that gets every part of you moving.”The Chieftains performed at the Great Wall of China, in Nashville and in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, joining with Roger Waters of Pink Floyd to play “The Wall.”Their best-known recordings included “Cotton Eyed Joe,” “O’Sullivan’s March,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat” and “Long Black Veil” (with Mr. Jagger). Their 1992 album “Another Country,” a collaboration with country artists like Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Chet Atkins, won the Grammy for best contemporary folk album.Their other Grammys included one for best pop collaboration with vocals for “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?,” a collaboration with Mr. Morrison from their album “The Long Black Veil,” released in 1995, and one for best world album, for “Santiago” (1996), consisting of Spanish and Latin American music.Mr. Moloney had an affinity for country music.“I always considered Nashville like another part of Ireland, down to the south or something,” he said on the website of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in 2020. “When I’ve come over there and played with musical geniuses like Sam Bush or Jerry Douglas or Earl Scruggs, they pick everything up so easily. You don’t have to duck and dash.”The last track on “Another Country” — “Finale: Did You Ever Go A-Courtin’, Uncle Joe/Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — features Ms. Harris, Ricky Skaggs and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Rambles, a cultural arts magazine, described it as “the closest you will come to an Irish hooley on record,” a reference to an Irish party with music. The track, the magazine said, sounded like “a few pints were quaffed and the boxty bread was passed around before the assembled greats of music decided to have a musical free-for-all.”Mr. Moloney in 2012. That year, the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains embarked on a tour that ended on St. Patrick’s Day at Carnegie Hall.Greg Kahn for The New York TimesPatrick Moloney was born on Aug. 1, 1938, in Donnycarney, in northern Dublin. His father, John, worked in the accounting department of the Irish Glass Bottle Company. His mother, Catherine (Conroy) Moloney, was a homemaker.Paddy came from a musical family: One of his grandfathers played the flute, and his Uncle Stephen played in the Ballyfin Pipe Band. Paddy began playing a plastic tin whistle at 6 and began studying the uileann pipes shortly afterward, under the tutelage of man known as the “King of the Pipers.”He took to the pipes easily, gave his first public concert when he was 9 and performed on local streets.“There were five pipers around the Donnycarney area,” he told Ireland’s Own magazine in 2019. “I’d go around the cul-de-sac playing like the pied piper, and my pals would be following behind me.”After leaving school in the 1950s, he started working at Baxendale & Company, a building supplies company, where he met his future wife, Rita O’Reilly. He joined the traditional Irish band Ceoltóirí Chualann in 1960 and formed the Chieftains in 1962; the name came from the short story “Death of a Chieftain” by the Irish author John Montague.In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Moloney was an executive of Claddagh Records, of which he was a founder, and produced or oversaw 45 albums in folk, traditional, classical, poetry and spoken word.The Chieftains — who hit it big in the mid-1970s with sold-out concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London — were strictly an instrumentalist ensemble at first. But in the 1980s the band pivoted from their early purism, and Mr. Moloney emerged as a composer, writing new music steeped in Irish tradition.The Chieftains began to blend Irish music with styles from the Celtic diaspora in Spain and Canada as well as bluegrass and country from the United States. They collaborated with well-known rock and pop musicians and with an international assortment of musicians as far-flung as Norway, Bulgaria and China.On his own, Mr. Moloney branched into writing and arranging music for films, including “Barry Lyndon” (1975), “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998) and “Gangs of New York” (2002).In addition to his wife and daughter, he is survived by two sons, Aonghus and Padraig; four grandchildren; and a sister, Sheila.In 2012, on the 50th anniversary of their founding, the Chieftains teamed up with 12 folk, country, bluegrass, rockabilly and indie rock artists — including Bon Iver, the Decembrists, the Low Anthem and Imelda May — to record the album “Voice of Ages.” They also embarked on a tour that ended at Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day.“What’s happening here with these young groups,” Mr. Moloney told The New York Times at the time, explaining the album’s concept, “is they’re coming back to the melody, back to the real stuff, the roots and the folk feeling of them all. I can hear any of them singing folk songs.” More

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      Why ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ the Album Has Always Rocked

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      When I discovered the record, it felt like the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.I’m here to spread the good word of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the album.It’s a little odd that a record so rapturously received, at least in the United States in the early ’70s, is now mostly left off best album lists, and didn’t secure a lasting place in the rock music canon.Then again, perhaps it was inevitable that “Superstar” the album would end up eclipsed by “Superstar” the stage show, which followed a year later. It’s natural to think of the album as an artifact of the theatrical experience, rather than as a singular artistic vision in its own right, because that’s the way it usually works. It can be tough, for new listeners, to hear the music for the theater.Maybe it’s just that no serious rock connoisseur wants to admit to digging the guys who did “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Excuse me, for a moment, if I come off as weirdly defensive about the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The night my parents met, my mother, a former singer, was performing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” onstage. She has still never seen “Evita.”Revisiting the 1970 album via the recent release of the 50th anniversary edition, I’m as excited by it as I was when I was 15 and listened to it for the first time. My high school classmates were wallowing in their teenage angst listening to Limp Bizkit and Korn — this was around the turn of the millennium — and here I was, immersed in the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.But for me, tuning into a Judas-centered retelling of the Passion of the Christ felt like a kind of rebellion too. I was obsessed with the song “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say),” which epitomized emo before that musical term existed, and the electric-shock scream of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, in the role of Jesus, railing at an unresponsive God. (“Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain!”) While “Superstar” isn’t overtly anti-religious, the impertinence of it gave a young, questioning Catholic a lot to think about.Like a lot of music I loved, and still love from that era, it was kind of preposterous. The “Superstar” overture alone — surely one of the most unsettling rock record openers, let alone musical overtures — features harrowing electric guitar, synth, strings, boisterous brass, and a choir dropped in from a horror movie. The whole thing is more Roger Waters than Rodgers and Hammerstein. Indeed, those musical ingredients can be heard in Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” released in the United Kingdom the same month as “Superstar.”The musical tracks for “Superstar,” Rice explained during a podcast, were laid down in a haze of marijuana smoke — at the same London studios where the Rolling Stones recorded “Sympathy for the Devil” — with each day’s session beginning with a half-hour jam session. Most of the musicians had played Woodstock behind Joe Cocker. Gillan recorded his vocals in three hours and played a gig with Deep Purple that night.It’s no wonder “Superstar” rocks.From the get-go, there’s “Heaven on Their Minds,” whose guitar riff has an evocative directness right up there with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” It also has Murray Head as Judas screaming “Jesuuuus!” and sounding kind of blasphemous doing it. How often do you want to blast a showtune — the term seems inadequate here — as loudly as possible? How many classic musicals kick off with a sound and atmosphere worthy of heavy metal? (Not counting “Les Misérables,” whose opening number features the chain-gang clink of actual heavy metal.)On the other end of the spectrum is “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a moment of tuneful introspection not miles away from Carole King’s “Tapestry,” which was the second-highest-selling album of 1971 behind “Superstar.”If one thinks of “Superstar” as a concept album, it’s that rare one that tells a compelling, coherent story, more narrative driven than Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” or The Who’s “Tommy,” with none of the vaporous verbiage of a lot of rock music at the time. The whole thing is built, as Lloyd Webber is fond of saying, “like a cast iron boat” — a rock radio play, or a stage show for the proscenium of the imagination. In music industry parlance, it’s all killer, no filler.Rice, the former aspiring pop star that he was, has always excelled in down-to-earth lyrics that make outsize characters thoroughly relatable. It’s partly why the lead vocal performances here hit you in the gut. When Yvonne Elliman’s Magdalene cries “He scares me so,” you believe her. When Murray Head’s Judas chokes out the same line, in his own anguished version of that song — Lloyd Webber, ever the skillful deployer of the poignant reprise — you believe him, too.When it comes to Lloyd Webber’s musical audacity, it can sometimes feel as if it’s not just rock snobs that underrate “Superstar,” but also self-professed musical theater lovers.Rice, left, and Lloyd Webber are now musical theater royalty. Yet some of their work remains underrated by musical fans.Again, it may seem strange to suggest that the composer of “The Phantom of the Opera,” sometimes considered to be one of the most successful pieces of entertainment, is underrated by musical fans. But it’s precisely because of that kind of commercial success that Lloyd Webber is taken for granted, dismissed as a populist composer of the kinds of hummable melodies that might, say, pacify a temperamental president.This is unfair to the composer who, on “Superstar,” was having his way with the kinds of time signatures that were dazzling fans of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Just listen to “The Temple,” its feverish 7/4 time signature is a nod to Prokofiev’s equally tumultuous seventh piano sonata, with nary a beat to take a breath. Even more impressive is “Everything’s Alright,” probably the catchiest tune ever written in 5/4. And I include Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” in that.That’s not to mention Lloyd Webber’s essential, monumental achievement here, of creating 90 minutes of music deftly combining orchestra, rock band and a small army of vocalists. Let’s just say that Stephen Sondheim, who happens to share a birthday with Lloyd Webber, doesn’t have a monopoly on musical complexity, psychological depth and conceptual ambition.Lloyd Webber and Rice became musical theater royalty. But before that, they were a couple of shaggy-haired youths who captured the disparate music of the era like few other musicals until “Hamilton.” There was nothing like it in 1970, and there’s not been a lot like it since. More

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      ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at 50: What Was the Buzz?

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      It was the spring of 1970, and Yvonne Elliman, an 18-year-old singer and guitarist from Hawaii, had just finished performing at a London nightclub when a breathless young man rushed the stage.“You’re my Mary Magdalene!” a wide-eyed, 22-year-old Andrew Lloyd Webber announced.“I thought he meant the mother of God,” Elliman, now 69, said in a recent phone conversation, explaining that she had been unfamiliar with the biblical story. “He was like, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s not the mother, it’s the whore.’”They had a laugh, and she went on to sing the part in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the seminal rock opera by Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, for the concept album, the first arena tour, the original Broadway production and the feature film.The musical, which opened 50 years ago on Oct. 12, 1971, turned the story of one of history’s most notorious executions into a splashy spectacle. In doing so, it married rock and musical theater, ushering in Broadway’s British invasion of the 1970s and 1980s and paving the way for shows like “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”But the nearly 90-minute concept album came first in 1970, because, as Lloyd Webber recalled recently to The Telegraph, no producer wanted to put “the worst idea in history” onstage.“We never knew how it was ever going to get staged,” Lloyd Webber, 73, said in a recent phone conversation. “So it wasn’t a collection of rock tracks or something put together. It had to be read to you and you could understand — the dramatic context of the whole thing had to be the recording.”Jeff Fenholt in the Broadway production. The rock opera portrays Jesus as simply a man, who loses his temper, doubts God and gets caught up in his own celebrity.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesThough the album fizzled in England, the rock opera with a full orchestra and gospel choir took off in America, climbing to No. 1 on the Billboard charts by February 1971. A year after its release, the initial album had sold 2.5 million copies in the United States.“We were staggered by the success,” Rice, 76, the show’s lyricist, said in a video call from his home in Buckinghamshire, England. “MCA let us make a single — two unknown guys — with a huge orchestra and a rock section. And with rather a controversial title. And it worked.”A national concert tour followed in 1971, and audiences packed stadiums to hear Elliman (Mary Magdalene), Carl Anderson (Judas) and Jeff Fenholt (Jesus) belt out hits like “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” “Heaven on Their Minds” and “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say).”“It was crazy,” Elliman said. “I was asked to go to a hospital and put my hands on a girl who’d been in a car accident. I didn’t know what to say — I held her hand and sat with her. But a few weeks later, her parents wrote to me that she got better immediately after me seeing her.”Broadway OpeningAndrew Lloyd Webber was 23 and Tim Rice was 26 when their show opened on Broadway on Oct. 12, 1971, at the Mark Hellinger Theater on 51st Street.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesAt last, they got the green light: Broadway.Tom O’Horgan (“Hair”) was tapped to direct after Lloyd Webber missed a telegram from the director Hal Prince, who had expressed interest. “The one person I’d have loved to have seen do it would have been Hal Prince,” Lloyd Webber said in the interview. “Would it have turned out differently? Would it have been good? I don’t know.”The show, which narrates the last seven days of Jesus’s life through the eyes of one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater on 51st Street to an audience that included Lloyd Webber, 23, and Rice, 26. But in a joint interview with The New York Times later that month, both men practically disowned their director.“Let’s just say that we don’t think this production is the definitive one,” said Lloyd Webber, who in later years would call O’Horgan’s $700,000 staging a “brash and vulgar interpretation” and opening night “probably the worst night of my life.”Reviews were mixed. Dick Brukenfield of The Village Voice praised Lloyd Webber’s “energetic music” but noted that the ocular dazzle — the sets included a large special-effects “chrysalis,” a bridge of bones, and a giant set of dentures — distracted from the story. “It looks like a record that’s been reproduced onstage with visual filler by Tom O’Horgan,” he wrote.The New York Times critic Clive Barnes panned the production, writing that it “rather resembled one’s first sight of the Empire State Building. Not at all uninteresting, but somewhat unsurprising and of minimal artistic value.”Cries of “Blasphemy!”Opening night attracted crowds of leaflet-bearing Christian and Jewish protesters, who regarded what The New York Times writer Guy Flatley called “the strutting, mincing, twitching, grinding, souped‐up ‘Superstar’” as theatrical sacrilege.“Going into the theater it’d be ‘Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’” said Ben Vereen, now 75, who played Judas.Lloyd Webber added: “I’m not convinced that Robert Stigwood, our producer, might not have actually orchestrated one or two of them. I think it might have had a much rougher ride today than it did then.”Rice and Lloyd Webber were accused of denying the divinity of Christ and making a hero of Judas, who is the unambiguous villain in the New Testament. Jewish leaders were alarmed that the musical made it appear as if Jews were responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion, which they feared would fan antisemitism.“We were criticized for leaving out the Resurrection,” Rice said. “But that was not part of our story because, by then, Judas was dead. And his story was over.”Conservative Christians were also startled by the sexual overtones between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who finds herself falling in love with him.“I’d get evil letters from people who said they wanted to kill Mary so Yvonne could come out again,” Elliman said.But Rice is clear: There was never an affair in the “Superstar” story line.“I would imagine he would have been a very attractive man and yet not somebody who was out looking for a girlfriend,” he said. “He was somebody who was charismatic and powerful. And, and this woman is slightly afraid of that, maybe afraid of what her own feelings are.”Jesus and JudasBen Vereen, center, played Judas. The character was inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” from the song “With God on Our Side.”Bettmann, via Getty ImagesJesus Christ, played by Jeff Fenholt, loses his temper, doubts God and gets a bit caught up in his own celebrity. He’s simply Jesus, the man, with all the attendant problems and failings.“He could feel pain,” Rice said. “If he was only a god, then things like a crucifixion, which is a horrible, horrible torture and death, wouldn’t really be a problem. If he’s a man, whether or not he’s a god, he has to suffer. He has to have doubts.”Those doubts are most on display in the “Gethsemane” rock scream, in which Jesus pleads — with a wailing G above high C — for God to let this cup pass from him.“We wanted to have a rock tenor who contrasted with the voice of Judas,” Lloyd Webber said.Vereen, who was cast as Judas, was nominated for a Tony Award for the role. He said the biblical account of the relationship between Jesus and Judas left him room for interpretation.“Jesus never wrote the book, and Judas never wrote the book,” he said. “All we hear is the hearsay of these men from the disciples in the Gospels.”Inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” from the 1964 song “With God on Our Side,” Rice set out to humanize the New Testament’s unambiguous villain.“I thought, well, ‘This is a very good character, which I can expand from what’s in the Bible, because there isn’t very much in the Bible,’” Rice said. “He was a human being. He had good points and bad points. He had strengths and weaknesses.”At first, Vereen said, he struggled to understand his character’s motivation. Then, after combing through the Bible, he came up with a theory.“Hypothetically speaking, maybe Judas really loved Jesus more than any of the other disciples and wanted him to be the hero that ruled the country,” Vereen said. “And he felt that if he betrayed him, the Israelites would rebel and put Jesus in the role.”A Musical Radio PlayYvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene. She was one of the few actors to not only perform on the concept album, but also to appear in the Broadway show and the movie.Rolls Press/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesBecause the show began as what Lloyd Webber calls a musical radio play, meant to be listened to straight through for 90 minutes without any visuals “on a turntable, in those days,” he said, he had to come up with strategies to keep the listener’s attention.“A lot of that has to do with how you plant themes and how you deal with them,” he said. “My idea for the overture was to introduce every ingredient that I could think of within the musical palette we were going to hear through the rest of the recording.”And then those themes recur, one by one, as when the whole of the overture is mirrored in the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate, or when a song reappears with a twist, like “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” To Mary Magdalene it’s a love song about Jesus; when it returns as a motif sung by Judas as a lament, the lyrics change: “He’s not a king, he’s just the same/As anyone I know/He scares me so.”“Judas understood Jesus, and he obviously was clearly obsessed and loved him,” Lloyd Webber said. “And then at the same time, you’ve got this woman, who was also, if you follow the Bible, clearly very, very much in love with him.”And then, of course, there’s the musical’s oddball track.Herod, Paul Ainsley’s glitter-flecked, platform-sandaled drag queen, commands the son of God to “Prove to me that you’re no fool/walk across my swimming pool” in “King Herod’s Song (Try It and See).” The bouncy ragtime number serves as comic relief after Jesus’s gut-wrenching “Gethsemane” aria.“It’s taking a conventional showbiz number and making it something really very, very nasty,” Lloyd Webber said. “When Herod turns around and says, ‘Get out of my life!,’ that’s a number that’s gone wrong.”Rice said: “Musically, I think it’s a brilliant stroke on Andrew’s part. Just as everything’s getting heavier and heavier and heavier, and suddenly you have a very catchy melody. We wanted people to almost be misled into thinking, ‘Oh, well, you know, maybe it’s going to be a happy ending.’”The Show’s LegacyWith $1.2 million in advance sales, the Broadway show sold out almost every performance for the first six weeks. But the hype quickly dimmed. It ran for 711 performances in all and failed to win a Tony Award despite five nominations, including one for best score.But the musical’s legacy has endured, spawning three Broadway revivals (in 1977, 2000 and 2012), a 2012 Lloyd Webber-produced televised competition series to cast the titular role for a British arena tour, a 2018 televised NBC production that starred John Legend as Jesus and resulted in Emmy wins for Rice and Lloyd Webber — and now the 50th anniversary American tour, interrupted by the pandemic, that resumed performances in Seattle late last month.“51 years since the album came out … blimey!” Rice said.Lloyd Webber, looking back, said, “Everything I was doing was all instinct.” He added, “Yes, I’d had some amateur productions, but we’d never had anything in the professional theater — and I don’t know whether that would have influenced us for good or bad.”He thought for a second.“Without sounding immodest” — he chuckled — “it’s actually rather good.” More

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      Bolshoi Performer Is Killed in Onstage Accident

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      The man, in his late 30s, was crushed during a scene change as the opera “Sadko” was performed before an audience, the theater said.A performer was killed during an opera at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on Saturday when there was an accident during a scene change, the theater said.The man, in his late 30s, was working as an extra in a performance of the opera “Sadko,” by the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.Russian news reports said that the man had been crushed by a piece of scenery, and videos of the event that circulated online showed it happening as a backdrop descended to the stage. As the chorus kept singing and the orchestra continued to play, there was a sudden commotion onstage. Performers waved their arms and shouted “Stop!” The music ground to a halt, and most of the performers walked offstage while a few went to the rear of the stage to help the man. The curtains closed.The show was stopped immediately, the Bolshoi said in a statement, and the audience was asked to leave.“A tragic accident happened during the ‘Sadko’ production tonight,” the Bolshoi, one of Russia’s most prestigious theaters, said in a statement. The theater said it was assisting investigators as they sought to determine the circumstances of the man’s death.The man was identified as Yevgeny Kulesh. He worked as part of a 50-person group of Bolshoi employees who serve as onstage extras, supplementing singers and dancers.Russian news reports said that audience members had not initially seemed aware of the death and appeared to think that the panic onstage was part of the performance.The Bolshoi has a history of strange deaths and injuries. In 2013, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet was severely injured when a masked man threw acid in his face. That same year, a violinist died after falling into the orchestra pit. More

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      Passing the Time With a Piano-Playing Pilot

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      As a pilot with United Airlines, Beau Brant flies North American routes. At every layover, he looks to play a mix of jazz, classical and more for his crew and strangers.It’s after midnight at the Palm Court in Cincinnati and staff is trying to close. Lights are dimmed as the last of the martini glasses and beer bottles are scooped up. But Beau Brant is still at the piano, playing for stragglers.Finally, a waitress gives him the “wrap-it-up” sign. Probably a good idea, since he has a flight to catch the next day, and he can’t be late.He’s the captain.Perhaps there are other piano-playing airline pilots, but how many have cut seven albums, performed for a U.S. president and had an original song used by Oprah Winfrey?Mr. Brant, 41, has been playing — and flying — most of his life. He started on the piano at age 3 and was flying by 12. A pilot with United Airlines for 17 years, Mr. Brant considers flying job number one. But with every layover, he looks for a place to play, just for the fun of it.A regular performer now at many of his layover hotels, Mr. Brant flies domestic routes from his homebase in Denver to the likes of Madison, Wis.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Jackson Hole, Wyo. He still has the occasional gig back home — his house piano is a Yamaha Grand — but gets most excited about playing on the road for his crew and strangers. And he’s fallen in love with the Bar at Palm Court, a soaring Art Deco venue in the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza: “The piano area reminds me of the Titanic’s ‘grand staircase.’ ”His sets are a rambling mix of jazz, blues, classical and show tunes. His style features a flashy right hand and plenty of bounce but no sheet music. And he loves talking about his two passions.The following are excerpts from conversations with Mr. Brant, edited for clarity.How did this fly-and-play routine come about?It started on a long-haul in 2005, New York to Frankfurt. We arrived early at the hotel, the rooms weren’t ready, and there was this beautiful piano in the lobby. I started playing for the crew and wound up playing happy hour.You used to play professionally?I grew up in Evergreen, just outside Denver, and played restaurants there when I was 12. Then hotels, weddings, birthdays — sometimes four or five nights a week. I wouldn’t be where I am today without music: Flight training is expensive.Beau Brant on the tarmac outside Jackson Hole Airport in Jackson, Wyo. “One of my favorite approaches anywhere,” the pilot said, is “landing next to the Grand Tetons.”Ryan RoweWhat are some of the most exotic places you’ve played?Paris, Zurich, Lisbon, Sydney, Shanghai. I flew international for much of my career. In 2019, I upgraded to captain on the Airbus 320 and now fly North American routes. But in the U.S., many hotels have retired their pianos, and they’re harder and harder to find.Your layover sets can last for hours — no charge?Sometimes I get food and drink, but that’s already covered by the airline. The tip jar can get anywhere from $20 to $200, but I use that to treat the crew to something. It’s definitely not about the money.What’s your drink of choice while playing?I enjoy a nice red wine, but there’s the 12-hour rule [the F.A.A. prohibits pilots from consuming alcohol 12 hours before work], and I’m very respectful of that. At the Plaza, it was soda water with lime.United knows about your double life, right?They used me in a social media commercial playing our theme song, “Rhapsody in Blue.” I play that at pretty much every performance.Are there similarities between flying and playing?There’s an art to music and an art to flying. Pilots have to operate under very strict procedures, but we can put our own touch on things — “finesse” the aircraft. With music, you can play a composition exactly like it’s written, but I like to take it and add my twist. I encourage my first officers to hand-fly — turn off all the automation. Hand-flying can be much smoother — small, gentle movements, like with music pieces.So, the president and Oprah Winfrey — how did those happen?I performed for President Ford in 1992 in Vail, Colo. In 1999, one of my songs was in a video presentation for a fund-raiser sponsored by Oprah, in Chicago, for her “Angel Network.”52 Places to Love in 2021We asked readers to tell us about the spots that have delighted, inspired and comforted them in a dark year. Here, 52 of the more than 2,000 suggestions we received, to remind us that the world still awaits.What’s flying been like since the pandemic?There’s still the masks, but we’re finally getting back to normal, bringing back food and drinks. I remember a flight last year when we had five crew and nine passengers.What would be your dream gig?I’d want to go back in time, to those Pan Am 747s that had a lounge with a piano. On the long-hauls, pilots get a break. I would have loved to play one of those lounges.Beau Brant’s music can be found on beaubrant.com.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2021. More

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      Sonia Sanchez Wins the Gish Prize

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      The poet, educator and activist will receive a cash award of about $250,000. The prize is for an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form” and “contributed to social change.”The poet and activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement, has been awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the prize trust said on Thursday.The honor, which carries a cash award of about $250,000, is awarded to an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form, contributed to social change and paved the way for the next generation.”Sanchez, the author of more than 20 books, is known for melding musical formats like the blues with traditional poetic forms like the haiku and tanka, using American Black speech patterns and experimenting with punctuation and spelling.Her work champions Black culture, civil rights, feminism and peace.“When we come out of the pandemic, it’s so important that we don’t insist that we go back to the way things were,” Sanchez said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “We’ve got to strive for beauty, which is something I’ve tried to do in my work.”This year, the five-member selection committee, led by Zeyba Rahman, the senior program officer of the Building Bridges program of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, chose Sanchez unanimously out of 50 finalists from various artistic disciplines.Rahman said in a statement that the award recognizes Sanchez’s “extraordinary literary gift and her lifelong commitment to speaking up for social justice.” On Nov. 11, Sanchez will reprise her role in Christian McBride’s “The Movement Revisited,” in which she will recite the words of Rosa Parks, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. More