The Morgan Library & Museum drew devotees out for a party celebrating its centennial, including Peter Marino, Vito Schnabel and Walton Ford.Over a century ago, J.P. Morgan built a majestic library for his opulent mansion in Midtown Manhattan. After his death, his son, the financier Jack Morgan, opened it to the public in 1924, and it eventually became the Morgan Library & Museum. Last night, crowds of art patrons and well-heeled bibliophiles gathered in that grand library to attend the Morgan’s centennial celebration.Beneath stained glass windows and murals of Dante and Socrates, guests wearing tuxedos sipped martinis while a violinist performed classical covers of pop songs by Keane and Taylor Swift. Servers wended through the crowd, carrying hors d’oeuvres trays of crescent duck and caviar as they passed shelves lined with rare editions of works by Rousseau and Voltaire.Devotees of the Morgan like the architect Peter Marino, the art dealer Vito Schnabel and the artist Walton Ford were in attendance. Patti Smith and her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, who would soon perform a song together at the evening’s dinner, pulled away from the cocktail hour to stroll through the exhibit “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature,” which displays the manuscripts and picture letters of the creator of Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.“Through her ephemera, you can feel Potter looking at her paint brushes,” Patti Smith said. “The Morgan’s collection honors the hand that writes the book. You get a sense of what an artist or writer was thinking as they were creating. You can see the energy lifting off Beethoven’s ink-splotched pages.”The Morgan Library & Museum’s director, Colin B. Bailey, slices into a cake made to look like a stack of books. The soprano Latonia Moore.The media and automotive heiress Katharine Rayner.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

“It’s an honor of a lifetime to finally check a Super Bowl performance off my bucket list,” the eight-time Grammy winner said.Usher Raymond, the eight-time Grammy-winning singer known as Usher, will headline the halftime show of Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas, the National Football League, Roc Nation and Apple Music announced on Sunday. It comes in the second year of the league’s multiyear deal with Apple Music and will be Usher’s first time starring in the show.“It’s an honor of a lifetime to finally check a Super Bowl performance off my bucket list,” Raymond said in a statement. “I can’t wait to bring the world a show unlike anything else they’ve seen from me before. Thank you to the fans and everyone who made this opportunity happen. I’ll see you real soon.”Raymond, 44, performed at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2011 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, as a complement to the lead act, the Black Eyed Peas. Raymond had been rumored as a potential candidate for this year’s halftime production after he extended his residency of shows in Las Vegas, which began in July 2022. His participation comes amid the N.F.L.’s partnership with Jay-Z’s sports and entertainment agency Roc Nation, which was signed in 2019 to boost the quality of its halftime shows.“Beyond his flawless singing and exceptional choreography, Usher bares his soul,” Jay-Z said in a statement. “I can’t wait to see the magic,” he added.Raymond’s performance follows Rihanna, who performed last year in Glendale, Ariz., making her pregnancy public from the sky-high Super Bowl stage, and catching the attention of fans on social media. In February 2022 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., as a nostalgic nod to the Super Bowl’s return to the region, the Los Angeles rap icons Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar performed at the halftime show, along with Eminem, Mary J. Blige and the special guest, 50 Cent.Raymond, a 23-time Grammy nominee, won his first Grammy in 2001 in the category best male R&B vocal performance for the song “U Remind Me.” His popularity rose in 2004 when he released the album Confessions. His most recent Grammy win came in 2013 for the song, “Climax.” Raymond, who has served as a coach for the game show The Voice and appeared in handful of movies, is currently performing concerts in Paris.The Super Bowl will take place on Feb. 11, 2024, and be hosted for the first time in Las Vegas at Allegiant Stadium, the $2-billion jet-black venue built by the Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis ahead of the team’s move to the city after the 2019 season.The N.F.L. had long shunned Las Vegas as a market and its association with gambling until 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited sports betting. Since then, Las Vegas has hosted the draft and the league’s annual all-star game, the Pro Bowl, but has also struggled with a string of high-profile arrests of players in the city. More

In 2017, the Detroit City Council honored Ms. Hand as the “first lady of Detroit” for her contributions to the techno music scene.Kelli Hand, a longtime disc jockey known as K-Hand who was named the “first lady of Detroit” for her musical accomplishments, was found dead on Aug. 3 at her home in Detroit. She was 56.Her death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Wayne County medical examiner, who said that the cause was related to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.Paramount Artists, which represented Ms. Hand, paid tribute to her on social media.“Kelli was undoubtedly the first lady of Detroit, and a trailblazer for women in the music industry,” the company said on Instagram.Ms. Hand was one of the first female D.J.s in Detroit’s music scene and became known for her catalog of albums and extended plays of house and techno with the start of her own label, Acacia Records, in 1990.In 2017, the Detroit City Council honored Ms. Hand with a resolution that called her the “first lady of Detroit” for being a pioneer in the city’s techno music scene and for being “an international legend” who toured clubs and electronic music festivals.The certificate highlighted some of her accomplishments in the male-dominated industry of electronic music in the 1990s, including being the first woman to release house and techno music.“Such an Honor and exciting,” Ms. Hand wrote on Instagram at the time.YouTube videos captured Ms. Hand wearing a headset and smiling and dancing in place as she entertained crowds with her mixes of bouncy beats at nightclubs and events while touring the world.Ms. Hand, whose legal given name was Kelley, was born on Sept. 15, 1964, and raised in Detroit, where her childhood revolved around music, particularly the drums, according to her website.Her passion for rhythm led her to study music theory in college in New York. She also enhanced her music education in the 1980s by frequenting the Paradise Garage nightclub, where, her site says, she soaked up the sounds of the emergent genre of music that would become known as house.In a 2015 interview with The Detroit Metro Times, she reflected on her interest in spinning records after visiting the club in New York City and others in Chicago.“After frequenting Paradise Garage so many times I wanted to buy the records because I loved the music,” she told The Metro Times. “So the next step was, I got to play these records in order to hear them! That led to purchasing a couple turntables, which also led me to D.J.ing in my own bedroom,” she said, adding that doing so led her to do a residence at Zipper’s Nightclub in Detroit.Ms. Hand also talked about how the D.J. scene was dominated by men when she was starting out and how that played a role in using the gender-neutral name K-Hand for her own music.“I wanted to come out with something that was kind of catchy,” she recalled. “At the same time, I didn’t want people to know that I was a girl, because I was just minding the music business. I’m like, OK, what’s going to happen if my name comes out, and I’m a girl, because mostly it’s a lot of guys? This was back in the day. So the label suggested ‘K-HAND.’”On her website, she said that music was not about how someone looks or about the D.J.’s skills but about “being ‘true’ to yourself, and having the ability to express yourself creatively through your own self-confidence that is within you.”Some of her better-known songs include “Think About It,” “Flash Back” and her 1994 breakout single, “Global Warning,” on the British label Warp Records. Billboard said those songs “put her in league” with Detroit’s other top disc jockeys.In a 2000 review in The New York Times about female disc jockeys and rappers taking part in a music festival, Ms. Hand talked about independent record production. When she took over the dance floor, the writer said, “a sense of freedom was thick in the air.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Neil Vigdor More

Sean Combs’s lawyer made a final appeal to the jury at his racketeering and sex trafficking trial in New York on Friday, arguing in often sarcastic tones that the government’s evidence contradicted its case against the hip-hop mogul.The lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, portrayed his client as a deeply flawed man who led a swinger’s lifestyle, had a drug problem and sometimes physically assaulted his girlfriends. But he argued government’s accusation that Mr. Combs was a sex trafficker or the ringleader of a racketeering organization was “badly exaggerated.”“He did what he did,” Mr. Agnifilo said. “But he’s going to fight to the death to defend himself from what he didn’t do.”Here are some takeaways from the defense’s closing argument.The defense focused on consent, credibility and overreach.Friday’s summation was the most substantive argument made to date by the defense, which called no witnesses during the trial and declined to put Mr. Combs on the stand.Mr. Agnifilo devoted long stretches of his four-hour closing argument to highlighting testimony, texts and video evidence, that he said demonstrated that Casandra Ventura and “Jane,” who testified under a pseudonym, consensually participated in the marathon sex parties that are central to the government’s claim that the women were sex trafficked.“You want to call it swingers, you want to call it threesomes,” he said, “whatever you want to call it, that is what it is — that’s what the evidence shows.”Mr. Agnifilo cast doubt on the credibility of some of the government’s witnesses, taking particular aim at Capricorn Clark, a former assistant to Mr. Combs who testified that she had been kidnapped twice at his direction. In one of those instances, she said, Mr. Combs was in possession of a gun, a statement that the defense said was not supported by other witnesses.At one point, Mr. Agnifilo suggested that the racketeering charge was an overreach and that Mr. Combs had been targeted by the government because the case began with a lawsuit, not anyone making a report to law enforcement. “He’s indicted by himself,” Mr. Agnifilo said, noting that no witnesses testified to being part of such an enterprise.The prosecution later objected, arguing that Mr. Agnifilo’s suggestion that Mr. Combs had been targeted was improperly made in front of the jury. Judge Arun Subramanian agreed and told jurors that the decision-making of the government or a grand jury on whether to charge a defendant was “none of your concern.”The defense offered an alternative view of the infamous video of a hotel assault.Mr. Agnifilo presented an alternative narrative for a critical piece of evidence in the case: a security-camera video that showed Mr. Combs beating Ms. Ventura in a hallway of a Los Angeles hotel in 2016.The jury has seen this footage numerous times during the seven-week trial, and witnesses described it from multiple angles, as well as what happened before and after the attack. The video also shaped public opinion of the case after CNN aired a version of it last year, prompting Mr. Combs to apologize, calling his behavior “inexcusable.”The government contends the video shows Mr. Combs beating Ms. Ventura when she tried to leave a marathon sex session with a male prostitute. That would be evidence he had physically compelled her to participate, a key element in proving sex trafficking.One of the sexual encounters took place at the InterContinental Century City hotel in Los Angeles. Video of Mr. Combs dragging Ms. Ventura down a hallway has been cited as part of the abusive conduct.Hunter Kerhart for The New York TimesBut Mr. Agnifilo characterized the attack as flowing from a quarrel over a phone, not punishment for leaving the “freak-off.” Early in the video, Ms. Ventura is seen walking down a hallway with a phone in her right hand, heading toward an elevator bank. Later, after Mr. Combs attacks her, he appears to retrieve the phone from her and walks back to the room with it.A gap in the time code on the video, Mr. Agnifilo said, suggests that Ms. Ventura went back in their hotel room for three minutes and 42 seconds before a security guard arrived. “The point is,” Mr. Agnifilo said, “the room is not a scary place.”Mr. Combs’s family was a focal point.Mr. Agnifilo pointed out that six of the music mogul’s seven children were in the courtroom to offer support — “the seventh being an infant.” Mr. Combs’s mother, Janice, a frequent presence at the trial, was also in the gallery.“You should know that,” ​M​r. Agnifilo told the jury. “You should know who he is,” he added, “the man takes care of people — that’s what’s in the evidence.”Wrapping his closing statement, Mr. Agnifilo returned to Mr. Combs’s family ties to add stakes to his potential acquittal. “He sits there innocent,” he said of his client. “Return him to his family who have been waiting for him.”Mr. Combs’s sons, Christian​ Combs and Justin​ Combs, arriving at court in Manhattan on Friday.John Lamparski/Getty ImagesOn Friday morning, one of Mr. Combs’s sons, Christian​ Combs, released new music under the name King Combs. The seven-song EP includes a track with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, called “Diddy Free.”On it, King Combs, 27, raps about those who “try to play the victim” and states “[expletive] the world, critics and the witness.” Later, he says: “this Bible might come in handy / this rifle might come in handy” and repeats a chorus on which he promises not to sleep “’til we see Diddy free.”​A​nother of Mr. Combs’s sons, Justin​ Combs, arrived at court wearing a shirt that read “Free Sean Combs” ​on Friday, but a court officer quickly tapped him on the shoulder — those kinds of visible messages of support are not allowed. He left the courtroom and the message was not visible when he returned.Mr. Agnifilo’s closing was marked by animated, often sarcastic, statements.Mr. Agnifilo, who opened his closing argument with a warning to the jurors that he likes to pace while he talks, used an energetic delivery to hammer home the defense’s skepticism of the government’s case. Speaking forcefully, gesticulating and pacing, he reacted to the idea that Mr. Combs was in charge of a racketeering enterprise: “Are you kidding me?”His demeanor loosened as he continued, and at one point Mr. Agnifilo made a reference to the 50th anniversary of “Jaws” and its quotable line “We’re going to need a bigger boat,” while poking fun at the investigators in the case: “We need a bigger roll of crime-scene tape!” Regarding the lubricant found in the raids of Mr. Combs’s homes, Mr. Agnifilo also gave a passionate “Whoo!” reminiscent of Al Pacino onscreen.In the first 30 minutes of his summation, Mr. Agnifilo appealed to the jury’s emotions, throwing in personal asides, laugh lines and detailed characterizations of the witnesses in colloquial terms, working to keep them engaged while broadly brushing away the legitimacy of the charges.At other times, his mockery was more direct. In referring to Ms. Ventura’s brief relationship with the rapper Kid Cudi, the defense lawyer became especially animated: “Cassie’s keeping it gangster!” he said, arguing that she was brazenly lying to both men, with no apparent fear of Mr. Combs.“I’m getting myself a burner phone,” Mr. Agnifilo said, imagining Ms. Ventura’s mind-set at the time. “Whooooaaaa — a burner phone!” the lawyer added. “Someone’s got a burner phone!” More

Seven conductors share what it’s like to lead Anton Bruckner’s monumental symphonies, and why they resonate today.Bruckner, Bruckner, everywhere.There was a time, as recently as three or four decades ago, when this composer was a relative rarity, especially outside Central Europe. His reputation preceded him. He was a religious man alien to the modern world, the author of monumental symphonies that many listeners found monumentally dull.He was a provincial, uncouth, hardly a sophisticate like Brahms or Mahler. There was the forbidding editorial history of his nine (or is that 11? 18?) symphonies, and the lingering unease at his adoption by Nazi propagandists. If Bruckner was never exactly absent from the repertoire, he was long its resident eccentric.Even if some listeners still struggle with this music, though, there has always been a band of Bruckner devotees among scholars, critics and musicians. “There is no doubt that if people once grow fond of Bruckner, they grow very fond of him,” the editor of Gramophone magazine said nearly a century ago. And lately, more and more people seem to have grown very fond of him indeed.Performances of Bruckner’s symphonies seem more common than ever, and not just because this year is the 200th anniversary of his birth. Recordings come out constantly, with offerings that include fresh takes on period instruments and entire cycles from our most esteemed ensembles. It used to be that Bruckner had to be programmed with Mozart to draw a crowd; now he carries enough weight to bring Messiaen or Ligeti along with him. Attitudes have changed; clichés have quietened. Observers once talked of the “Bruckner Problem.” Now, we live in the Bruckner Moment.Conductors have played a major part in this transformation. Many of those working today are not just fond of Bruckner, but truly love his scores. For some, a performance of one comes close to a transcendent experience. Gone are the days when Bruckner was the preserve of the grizzled, graying maestro: Yannick Nézet-Séguin, for example, recorded the Seventh when he was just 31. Studying the music earlier in their careers, conductors have more opportunities to perform it; as technical standards have risen, even unheralded orchestras can give persuasive accounts of works that once posed challenges.So, what is Bruckner’s music like to conduct? Why do his symphonies, the expression of a deep Catholic faith, resonate so loudly in an increasingly secular age? How have these long, complicated works grown so remarkably in stature while our attention spans have become so brief? In interviews, seven conductors offered their thoughts; here are edited excerpts from those conversations.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