Aurelia Butler

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    Why Isn’t My Favorite Composer More Popular?

    I love the operas of Leos Janacek. So do audiences — when they go to see them. But the works remain stubbornly on the outskirts of the repertory.When I was just getting started as an operagoer, I went to see “The Makropulos Case,” the Czech composer Leos Janacek’s tale of a woman desperate to elongate a life that has already lasted three centuries.It left me exhilarated, dazed and with only one thing on my mind: buying a ticket to return the next weekend.I’m not the only one to have this reaction. “People felt they had to come back,” Yuval Sharon said recently about the audiences when he directed “The Cunning Little Vixen,” another thrilling, heart-rending Janacek opera. “It was unlike any piece they’d experienced. It just seizes you.”That’s still my feeling about Janacek’s operas. On Sunday, when the Cleveland Orchestra finished an elegant but crushing concert version of “Jenufa,” which ends with a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation after extraordinary suffering, I would have happily sat through it again, right then and there.The end of ‘Jenufa’Elisabeth Söderström and Wieslaw Ochman; Vienna Philharmonic; Charles Mackerras, conductor (Decca)For this brutal account of small-town woe, Janacek wrote earthy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths. There are obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters, as well as passages of folk-inspired sweetness.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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    At Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial, Former Employee Expected to Describe Being Kidnapped

    Prosecutors are set to present the testimony of a onetime assistant, who they say was twice held against her will. The defense denies she was kidnapped.A former employee of Sean Combs who, prosecutors say, was kidnapped twice by the music mogul or his bodyguards, is expected to testify on Tuesday at Mr. Combs’s racketeering and sex-trafficking trial.The woman, Capricorn Clark, has been a frequent character in testimony at the trial, figuring prominently in the much-discussed fallout over Mr. Combs’s discovery that Casandra Ventura, his longtime on-and-off girlfriend, and the rapper Scott Mescudi, known as Kid Cudi, were romantically involved.The government contends that after Mr. Combs discovered evidence of the budding relationship in late 2011, he went — armed and with a bodyguard — to wake up Ms. Clark in the middle of the night and force her to take them to Mr. Mescudi’s home. On Thursday, Mr. Mescudi gave his account of Mr. Combs’s jealous meltdown, which he said escalated to his Porsche being set on fire with a Molotov cocktail in early 2012.Lawyers for Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges, have denied Mr. Combs’s involvement in any kidnapping or arson — and have said there was never any criminal conspiracy. They assert that Ms. Ventura and another woman that Mr. Combs is accused of sex trafficking are not victims, but rather former girlfriends who agreed to participate in sex that, while “kinky,” was entirely consensual and legal.Capricorn Clark, a former employee of Mr. Combs, is expected to testify this week.U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New YorkThe kidnapping accusations are meant to buttress the racketeering conspiracy charge against Mr. Combs, which accuses him and members of his inner circle of a series of crimes dating back to 2004. The crimes cited in the indictment include sex trafficking, arson, drug violations, bribery, obstruction of justice and two acts of kidnapping — both of them involving Ms. Clark.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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    The Return of Pulp, a Serious Band That Doesn’t Take Itself Seriously

    The Britpop group led by Jarvis Cocker reunited for “More,” its first album since 2001. The stakes are different, the band more mature and the songs still thoughtful.Jarvis Cocker can opine. The mop-topped, bespectacled frontman of Pulp, the beloved Britpop act, is in demand as a conversationalist for the canny turns of phrase and pungent references that also animate his lyrics.Get him into a room with his bandmates — he and the three longest-running members had gathered last month at the Barbican Center in central London to talk about their newest album — and he will gladly unspool about what undergirds pop (“repressed feelings”) and the unexpected strife of band life: “You can’t get insurance! It’s loads more expensive for a musician.”Then there’s the threat posed by streaming. “We’re in a situation now where you could live your whole life without ever listening to a piece of music more than once; you can just let it all just go past you, in a kind of scented candle vibe,” he said with horror.Pulp, as the name suggests, is more visceral than that, with wryly observed dance-floor anthems that explore the social pecking order, like the enduring 1995 track “Common People.” What “made Pulp songs interesting,” Cocker said he realized lately, is that “they’re often quite frantic, trying to get some idea across or to work something out in your mind. Hysterical, sometimes, almost.”That propelled them through their ’90s heyday, anyway. But “More,” Pulp’s first record in nearly a quarter-century, out June 6, has a different thrust: more introspective, more room to breathe. When he played it in the offices of Rough Trade, Pulp’s label, “Someone said, oh, that’s very age appropriate,” Cocker, 61, recalled. “I took it as a compliment.”Sitting around a long conference table at the Barbican, the cultural center where they had gigged over the years, his bandmates — Candida Doyle, the keyboardist; Mark Webber, the guitarist; and Nick Banks, the drummer — mostly jibed with their songwriter and semi-democratic leader. But they did sometimes laugh (affectionately) at him.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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    Marcel Ophuls, ‘The Sorry and the Pity’ Director, Dies at 97

    He was best-known for “The Sorrow and the Pity,” a landmark film that debunked ideas of vast French resistance to the Nazi occupation.Marcel Ophuls, the German-born filmmaker whose powerful documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” exploded the myth of widespread French resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, died over the weekend in France. He was 97.His death was announced by his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, who did not provide further details. Mr. Ophuls had directed several minor feature films before vaulting to fame in 1969 with “The Sorrow and the Pity,” his four-and-a-half-hour documentary on wartime Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial city located almost at the center of France. In a dispassionate, incisive style, he interviewed shopkeepers and farmers, bankers and entrepreneurs, teachers and lawyers who either collaborated with the Nazis and the Vichy regime or actively resisted the occupation — but who in most instances had turned a blind eye to the roundups of Jews and anti-Nazis.When the film was first shown in Paris cinemas, it was met with shock, outrage and tears. It stripped away the myth — fostered by Charles de Gaulle when he returned to France with the victorious Allied armies in 1944 — that a vast majority of his compatriots were either open or secret supporters of his resistance movement.Originally produced for television, “The Sorrow and the Pity” was banned from French airwaves until 1981. Conservative politicians denounced Mr. Ophuls, calling his work a “prosecutorial film” that unfairly portrayed the French as cowardly or worse. “It doesn’t attempt to prosecute the French,” Mr. Ophuls insisted in a 2004 interview with The Guardian newspaper. “Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?”‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ used French and German wartime newsreels, including one of Adolf Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower during a visit to France.Milestone Film)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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    Last Year’s Cannes Winners Won Big at Oscars. Can the 2025 Crop Do the Same?

    The most likely movies to grab academy voters are “Un Simple Accident,” “Sentimental Value” and “Nouvelle Vague.” But none are primarily in English.Awards strategists used to be wary of the Cannes Film Festival, claiming it came too early in the calendar to launch a lasting Oscar campaign.They don’t say that anymore.The last two editions of Cannes have proved to be a veritable gold rush, producing three best-picture nominees each. The 2024 festival proved particularly fruitful, as films that premiered at Cannes — including “Emilia Pérez,” “The Substance,” “Flow” and the eventual best-picture winner, “Anora” — won a combined nine Oscars.But this year’s crop of Cannes contenders may have a harder time hitting those highs. The three films with the strongest best-picture potential are all primarily in a language other than English, and the academy has never nominated more than two such films in a single year for the top Oscar. Still, as the academy grows ever more global, it’s possible all three could break through.The first big contender is Jafar Panahi’s “Un Simple Accident,” a taut moral drama about former Iranian prisoners who believe they’ve tracked down their old torturer. The winner of the Palme d’Or, “Un Simple Accident” is the most accessible movie yet from Panahi, a dissident filmmaker who has twice been imprisoned by Iranian authorities. And like the last five Palme winners, the film will be distributed by Neon, which has a track record of steering them to Oscar glory.Only one thing gives me pause. Neon also handled last year’s Cannes entry “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which had a similar back story: It, too, was directed in secret by an Iranian dissident, though even with that compelling narrative, it couldn’t muster more than an international-film nomination. Hopefully, Panahi’s Palme win will nudge Neon to campaign even harder for “Un Simple Accident,” which could factor into the picture and director categories with the right push.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 Trial Draws Long Lines and Limited Seating

    Without any livestreaming of the often graphic testimony, securing space inside the federal courtroom has meant long lines and long waits.Hours before sunset, the line begins to form outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. By the time the sun has risen again, some 13 hours later, the sidewalk is quite full.Queue psychologists, who study things like how to keep the hordes happy in lines at Disney World, would have a field day at the trial of Sean Combs.Since the trial started two weeks ago, folks have been showing up at ungodly hours to wait for a seat in the room where the music mogul is facing racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.News reporters assigned to cover the trial are joined in equal numbers by vloggers who have made the case their subject of the moment and members of the public who are simply interested in hearing the courtroom testimony.During the first two days of the trial, when the crowds were bigger, one YouTuber, Mel Smith, said he would leave his house in Beacon, N.Y., at about 3:30 p.m. to get a seat for the next morning’s testimony. When he arrived at about 5 p.m., he said, there were already a half-dozen people waiting in front of him.“Everybody knows P. Diddy — he’s a household brand — and everybody’s clicking all day to see what’s the latest updates,” he 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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    If You Want a Seat at the Trial of Sean Combs, Leave Yesterday

    Without any livestreaming of the often graphic testimony, securing space inside the federal courtroom has meant long lines and long waits.Hours before sunset, the line begins to form outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. By the time the sun has risen again, some 13 hours later, the sidewalk is quite full.Queue psychologists, who study things like how to keep the hordes happy in lines at Disney World, would have a field day at the trial of Sean Combs.Since the trial started two weeks ago, folks have been showing up at ungodly hours to wait for a seat in the room where the music mogul is facing racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.News reporters assigned to cover the trial are joined in equal numbers by vloggers who have made the case their subject of the moment and members of the public who are simply interested in hearing the courtroom testimony.During the first two days of the trial, when the crowds were bigger, one YouTuber, Mel Smith, said he would leave his house in Beacon, N.Y., at about 3:30 p.m. to get a seat for the next morning’s testimony. When he arrived at about 5 p.m., he said, there were already a half-dozen people waiting in front of him.“Everybody knows P. Diddy — he’s a household brand — and everybody’s clicking all day to see what’s the latest updates,” he 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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    Ute Lemper Still Sings Songs of Rebellion. The Stakes Are Still High.

    The German-born cabaret performer’s latest album celebrates the 125th anniversary of Kurt Weill’s birth, yoking classics to the language of today’s music.“Welcome to Weimar — to the year 2025,” Ute Lemper announced.The German-born singer and actress was greeting friends and colleagues who had squeezed into the Birdsong Society’s small headquarters by Gramercy Park to hear her perform songs from her latest album, which celebrates Kurt Weill, a composer Lemper has championed for four decades.Sliding into the album’s title number, “Pirate Jenny,” Lemper got even closer to a listener who had been standing just a few feet away, fixing him with a snarling grin. Featured in “The Threepenny Opera,” the most celebrated of Weill’s noted collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the tune has been covered by artists from Nina Simone to Judy Collins. It’s also the only standard written from the perspective of a hotel maid waiting for a ship of pirates to arrive and, at her behest, murder all the guests.“It’s a song about revolution and rebellion,” Lemper explained in an interview before the event. The singer is less intimidating in conversation than she is when channeling bloodlust. She’ll turn 62 in July, and with her long, lean frame and impossibly high cheekbones, she still projects the cool beauty of a runway model.Lemper was perceived as something of a rebel herself, at least in her native country, when Decca Records released “Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill” in 1988. The album, which evolved from “a little fringe record I made in Berlin” a couple of years earlier, earned Lemper an international fan base — with one notable exception.“The Germans hated it,” Lemper recalled. “They weren’t interested in speaking about the past.” Decca’s chief executive at the time, Roland Kommerell, German himself, had started a project dedicated to bringing back music that had been banned under the Nazis, including classical symphonies and Weimar-era cabaret songs — music composed by Jews who were persecuted or, like Weill, forced into exile.“It was a huge chapter to rip open; it was still bleeding at the time,” Lemper said. “And suddenly, I was in the position to have to respond to hundreds of journalists about this music. I became almost the representative of my generation, the Cold War generation, in Germany.”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