Aurelia Butler

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    The Hunt for a 316-Year-Old Stradivarius Stolen in the Fog of War

    The violin by the famed Italian luthier was plundered at the end of World War II and presumed lost or destroyed. Now experts say they believe it has resurfaced.As Germany devolved into chaos at the end of World War II, a rare violin from the famed shop of the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari was plundered from a bank safe in Berlin.The instrument, crafted in 1709 during the golden age of violin-making, had been deposited there years earlier by the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family as Nazi persecution put assets owned by Jews in jeopardy.For decades after the war, the family searched to no avail for the violin, known as the Mendelssohn, placing ads in magazines and filing reports with the German authorities. The violin, valued at millions of dollars, was presumed lost or destroyed.The Mendelssohn Stradivarius is shown here in black-and-white photos before it was stolen. It bears striking similarities to an instrument that passed through a New York auction house in 2000, shown here in color.Carla Shapreau; Mendelssohn-Bohnke Papers; TarisioNow, the Mendelssohn may have resurfaced. An eagle-eyed cultural property scholar, Carla Shapreau, recently came across photos from a 2018 exhibition of Stradivarius instruments in Tokyo. She spotted a violin that bore striking similarities to the Mendelssohn, though it has a different name — Stella — and creation date — 1707 instead of 1709.“My jaw dropped,” said Shapreau, a senior fellow with the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who had been searching for the instrument for more than 15 years.

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    Ozzy Osbourne Plays His ‘Final Song’ With Black Sabbath

    The metal luminary, 76, took the stage with his original bandmates at a farewell festival in his Birmingham, England, hometown on Saturday night.“Look at all this love for heavy metal.”James Hetfield, the guitarist and lead vocalist for Metallica, gazed out at the crowd at Villa Park, a football stadium in Birmingham, England, on Saturday. His band was the last of a slew of headliner-caliber metal acts and seasoned pros in and around the genre to perform ahead of the night’s honoree and hometown hero: Ozzy Osbourne.The gathering, a daylong festival called Back to the Beginning, was designed as both a tribute and a farewell. Osbourne, who has stepped back from live performance amid health issues including Parkinson’s disease and emphysema, played solo for the first time in nearly seven years and then, for the first time since 2005, reunited with all three other original members of his pathbreaking 1970s band Black Sabbath — the guitarist Tony Iommi; the bassist Terence Butler, known as Geezer; and the drummer Bill Ward — for a four-song set.Both performances were billed as career finales at the event, which was organized by Osbourne’s wife, Sharon, along with the Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, and streamed worldwide with a two-hour delay.“Metallica is so grateful to be invited here to see all your beautiful faces and celebrate the band Black Sabbath, because without Sabbath there would be no Metallica,” Hetfield continued. “Thank you, boys, for giving us a purpose in life; thank you, Black Sabbath.”Gratitude was a theme throughout the concert, where artists didn’t simply cite Black Sabbath for inspiring them musically, but often credited the group with fostering an entire global subculture.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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    Stuart Burrows, Welsh Lyric Tenor Who Straddled the Atlantic, Dies at 92

    He was a mainstay at both the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House, winning acclaim for his full tenor range and a rich, unforced tone, notably singing Mozart. Stuart Burrows, a Welsh lyric tenor prized by conductors on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1970s and ’80s for his agile singing in Mozart, becoming a mainstay at the Metropolitan Opera and at Covent Garden in London, died on Sunday in Cardiff, Wales. He was 92.His death, in a hospice facility, was confirmed by his son, Mark.Mr. Burrows was a coal miner’s son who was schooled in the chapels of Cilfynydd, the village where he was born. His clear voice and attention to detail would make him an ideal Ottavio in “Don Giovanni” and Tamino in “The Magic Flute.”His control was effortless throughout the full tenor range, his tone rich and unforced, as in his role as Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” In Georg Solti’s 1974 recording of that opera, Mr. Burrows’s voice was “most beautiful and sensitive,” the critic John Warrack wrote in a review in the magazine Gramophone.Mr. Burrows nearly opted for a professional rugby career as a young man in the early 1950s — he turned down a contract with the club in Leeds at the last minute — but he knew he had a gift that he could not ignore, though his career wouldn’t blossom for another decade.“I knew I could sing,” he told the BBC in 1972. Yet, he added, “I never had ambition to be a singer.” Singing was merely part of the landscape in bardic Wales; the renowned baritone Geraint Evans was born in the same village — and even on the same street — as Mr. Burrows.He had settled happily into a role as a schoolteacher in nearby Bargoed, teaching woodworking and music, “a job which he enjoyed immensely,” Roger Wimbush wrote in a biographical sketch in Gramophone in 1971. But then Mr. Burrows sang “Il Mio Tesoro” from “Don Giovanni,” in Welsh, in a singing competition in 1959 at the age-old national Eisteddfod festival, and won. 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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    Oasis Live Review: The Gallaghers Reunite, Their Songs Still Stomping and Wounds Still Healing

    The British band, a showcase for the intoxicating but toxic chemistry of the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, performed for the first time in 16 years.It was a few songs into Oasis’s first concert in 16 years and — despite the heavy anticipation, the rabid fan attention, the relief of simply seeing the Gallagher brothers walk onstage together, Liam’s left arm draped over Noel’s shoulder — there was something still tentative in the air at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, on Friday night. A crowd of 62,000 fans was vibrating, and cheering and singing along, but still waiting for license to rage.Liam, the band’s frontman and the punchier of the two brothers — Noel, the songwriter and guitarist, is far more dour — seemed to sense the dryness.Turn around, he told the audience. Find someone and throw your arms around them. Hold them tight, he said. Then the band finally located its detonator.That was “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” from its mighty, snarling 1994 debut album, “Definitely Maybe.” The guitars started at maximum sleaze, and Liam began singing the lyrics — about all the fun ways to tune out when life gets boring — with real brio. The crowd, especially down on the stadium floor, began ecstatically hopping in place in little rugby scrums, then erupted out of them as the band peaked at the chorus. Finally, everyone had shaken off their nerves.The New York TimesFor around two hours, Oasis — perhaps the most meaningful and popular British band of the 1990s, and certainly the rowdiest and most fun — toggled back and forth between masculinist ecstasy and a sometimes fumbling search for it in a frills-free and dogged performance. At times, it was pure triumph, the grandest pub singalong fathomable. At other moments, it was a ramble in the dark.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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    Oasis Starts Its World Tour With Cardiff Concert

    Liam and Noel Gallagher put aside their brotherly rivalry to play the first date of their band’s long-awaited comeback tour in Cardiff, Wales.They had waited 15 years for this moment, and they couldn’t believe it was happening.Dressed in bucket hats, Adidas tracksuits and other ’90s looks, a boisterous crowd gathered on Friday at the 75,000-capacity Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, to witness one of the unlikeliest reunions in rock music.Oasis was back.For two hours, at least.Around 8:15 p.m. local time, Noel and Liam Gallagher, the two stars of a band whose anthemic hits include “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” swaggered onstage, putting aside decades of brotherly war.Liam had his arm around his older brother’s shoulder, and as the phrase “The Great Wait Is Over” flashed on screens at the back of the stage, the pair strode forward, holding each other’s hands skyward.The ringing chords of the group’s 1995 track “Hello,” which features the refrain “It’s good to be back,” wafted over the crowd, kick-starting a 41-date sold-out world tour that includes two concerts at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.After an opening filled with fraternal joy, the brothers soon reverted to type. For the rest of the set they stood about 30 feet apart and barely glanced at each other. Liam, 52, wearing a black rain jacket, clasped his hands behind his back as he sang upward toward the microphone. Noel, 58, dressed in a blue shirt, stared at his guitar in concentration.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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    Kesha Seeks a Chaotic Love, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Foo Fighters, Ethel Cain, Tyler Childers and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Kesha, ‘Red Flag.’Now that Kesha’s lawsuits and record-company contracts are in the past, her first independently released album, “. (Period),” doubles down on her persona as an unruly, thrill-seeking party girl who wants what she wants. In the peppy “Red Flag,” she welcomes chaos and complication over boredom. “I need a certain kind of chemical / It’s dangerous and unforgettable,” she sings, with an edge of Auto-Tune. The track revs up a combination of synth-pop pulsation and hand-clapping trance buildups, an adrenaline rush of romantic disaster.J.I.D. featuring Eminem, ‘Animals (Pt. 1)’The Atlanta rapper J.I.D. — born Destin Route — zooms through a barrage of syllables in the virtuosic “Animals (Pt. 1).” It’s a breakneck boast that juggles rhyme schemes and percussive flows with casual precision: “I’m good at my job / It’s not a walk in the park ’cause I’m in a metropolis / I’m lost in a thought but escaping the darkness.” J.I.D. is confident enough to split the track with a past master of enunciation and internal rhymes, Eminem. He pivots the production from eerily electronic to orchestral, without lessening the beats per minute or syllables per second.Foo Fighters, ‘Today’s Song’“Today’s Song,” the first new Foo Fighters song since 2023, starts as an elegy, then explodes into an exhortation to persevere. “Two sides to a river,” Dave Grohl sings as drums and power chords come crashing in, and, later, “We’ll drown in the middle / Which side are you on?” It’s the band’s latest earnest, uplifting hard-rock anthem, and despite a few rhyming-dictionary lyrics, the feeling comes through.The Reds, Pinks and Purples, ‘What’s the Worst Thing You Heard’The Reds, Pinks and Purples, from San Francisco, merge the 1960s and the 1980s at their most dejected. They share the ringing picked guitars of folk-rock with the bitter tunefulness of the Smiths and the Go-Betweens. On their new album, “The Past Is a Garden I Never Fed,” the song titles are a checklist of pessimism, from artistic careers to life choices: “The World Doesn’t Need Another Band,” “You’re Never Safe from Yourself,” “No One Absolves Us in the End.” In “What’s the Worst Thing You Heard?,” rising chords disguise dimming expectations; “I know we’re going to crash,” Glenn Donaldson sings, unconsoled by a brisk beat and a pretty guitar pattern.Ethel Cain, ‘___ Me Eyes’In the new single from Ethel Cain’s album due in August, “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,” she sings about a troubled fast girl from a small town, potentially a romantic rival in the album’s narrative. “She’s got her makeup done and her high heels on,” the singer observes. “She goes to church straight from the clubs / They say she looks just like her mama before the drugs.” The track’s pulsing synthesizers echo the 1981 Kim Carnes hit “Bette Davis Eyes,” which Cain has covered on tour. But unlike the casual seductress in that song, Cain’s character grows tearful behind her bravado. “They all want to take her out / But no one ever wants to take her home,” Cain wails in a surge of sympathy.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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    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Faces Not Just a Sentencing, but a Host of Civil Cases

    The music mogul, convicted on lesser charges at his federal trial, has been accused of sexually assaulting people in dozens of suits. He has denied the allegations.The federal trial of Sean Combs ended on Wednesday with the media mogul acquitted on the most serious charges, but while Mr. Combs remains in jail and awaits sentencing for charges of transporting prostitutes, he also faces ongoing civil lawsuits.There are more than 50 lawsuits accusing him of sexual abuse, the majority of which are based in New York. The accusations date as far back as the 1990s and include allegations of druggings and rapes, often at parties. The plaintiffs are a mix of men and women, and at least a dozen say Mr. Combs sexually assaulted them when they were minors. Many of the suits were filed anonymously.In a statement following the verdict, Erica Wolff, a civil lawyer who represents Mr. Combs, said the outcome helped prove “what we have been saying about the civil cases since day one: they are all fabricated attempts to extort windfall payments from an innocent man.”“Mr. Combs never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone,” she said. “From the beginning, we have vigorously defended against the civil plaintiffs’ made-up claims with full confidence that Mr. Combs would prevail in the criminal case, and he did.”But now the question becomes whether evidence from the criminal case could find a way into the civil suits in ways that could affect their outcomes. Mr. Combs was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy during the criminal trial, but he was found to have engaged in transportation to move escorts over state lines for the purposes of prostitution.Still, there was a lot of testimony that he was repeatedly violent to a former girlfriend and used drugs in sexual situations.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