Aurelia Butler

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    The Revolutionary Sound at the Heart of ‘The Nutcracker’

    There comes a moment in “The Nutcracker,” a ballet full of fantasy of fantastical music, when the Sugar Plum Fairy dances to a tune you’ve probably heard before.Over plucked string instruments, a glassy, bell-like melody emerges from a celesta, evoking water drops and then more as those drops give way to flowing runs. It’s a transporting sound: mysterious and otherworldly, delicate and playful.This is the famous “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” a highlight of “The Nutcracker” and a holiday staple, born on the stage and heard today in commercials and on movie soundtracks around this time every year.Unmute to listen as Megan Fairchild dances the Sugarplum Fairy in New York City Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.New York City BalletThe “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is so familiar that it’s difficult to imagine that when this music was new, in 1892, it was really new. And that’s because of the celesta.Only recently invented, the celesta was in its infancy when Tchaikovsky began to imagine how he might write for it. Since then, its sound has spread throughout classical music and into pop, often with the same magical effect you hear in “The Nutcracker.” More

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    The Classical Music Our Critics Can’t Stop Thinking About

    Watch and listen to five recent highlights, including performances by Davóne Tines and Lise Davidsen, and a new album by Ethan Iverson.The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what hooked them during the past month. Leave your own favorites in the comments.Davóne TinesAn installation view of “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” part of “Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial” at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAndrew Carnegie’s 1902 mansion on Fifth Avenue, a Georgian homage on an immense, Gilded-Age scale, is currently the home of a more modest domestic scene: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s childhood living room.As part of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s triennial exhibition, “Making Home,” Tines has worked with the director Zack Winokur and the artist Hugh Hayden to create “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” an uncanny, poignant replica of the house of Tines’s grandparents, who raised him.‘Living Room, Orlean, Virginia’Sonic composition by Davóne Tines and Zack Winokur with Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, and John Hilton Tines Sr. Sound engineered by Al Carlson.The “Living Room” tableau, arranged on an enormous rocker, is a meditation on “home” as something soothing yet precarious for a musician like Tines, who spends much of his year on the road. On closer inspection, this installation, with its cozy arrangement of furniture, an upright piano and even a rug over carpeted flooring, has a dreaminess to it: Eerily, the photo frames are empty.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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    Chris Brown’s Concerts Draw Protest in South Africa

    Women’s rights activists have petitioned for the singer to be denied a visa for two shows in South Africa, where gender-based violence is high.After Chris Brown announced that he would be performing in Johannesburg, tickets for the city’s 94,000-capacity FNB Stadium sold out in under two hours. A second show was swiftly added.Nearly as quickly came a protest against Brown, who has faced allegations of violence and harassment of women including his guilty plea on charges that he assaulted Rihanna, his then-girlfriend, in 2009. Women for Change, a South African nonprofit, started a petition to block Brown’s performances on Dec. 14 and 15. The organization presented the petition, which received over 50,000 signatures, to the country’s Departments of Home Affairs and of Sports, Arts and Culture, asking that Brown be denied a visa.The singer’s planned return has particular resonance in South Africa, where women are killed at a rate five times higher than the global average, with 60.1 percent of those murders committed by an intimate partner, according to a study by the South African Medical Research Council. “We aim to send a clear message that South Africa will not celebrate individuals with a history of violence against women,” Sabrina Walter, the founder of Women for Change, said in an interview.Brown and his representatives have not addressed the protest, but in October, as the group spread the #MuteChrisBrown hashtag on social media, the singer seemed to troll the organization by writing, “Can’t wait to come,” under one of its Instagram posts. Walter said the reply triggered a wave of online harassment from Brown’s followers, including death threats against her and her team. It was not the first time Brown used his fame to rally against detractors. He has challenged other celebrities who refer to allegations made against him, and in February used Instagram to accuse the NBA of bowing to sponsor pressure to disinvite him from participating in an event related to its All-Star game. In 2019, Brown was released without charges after being accused of aggravated rape in France. He then sold T-shirts that read “This Bitch Lyin’” online.In the years since his 2009 arrest, Brown has been accused a number of times of violence against women, including throwing a rock through his mother’s car window in 2013 and punching a woman at a Las Vegas nightclub in 2016. In 2017, his ex-girlfriend Karrueche Tran obtained a temporary restraining order, citing harassment, physical violence, intimidation and death threats during and after their on-again-off-again relationship, which lasted from 2011 to 2015. In 2022, a judge dismissed a lawsuit that accused Brown of drugging and raping a woman on a yacht owned by Sean Combs.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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    Book Review: ‘Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film,’ by Julie Gilbert

    In “Giant Love,” the novelist’s great-niece chronicles the Texas saga’s divisive reception and the epic film adaptation that’s now better known than the book.GIANT LOVE: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film, by Julie GilbertAs if to defy her adult height of 5-foot-1, the writer Edna Ferber lived large, traveled widely and typed long and often.Her dozen-odd novels were Dagwood sandwiches of intergenerational drama, hotly seasoned with social commentary. “So Big,” about a female farmer and her son in a Dutch community outside Chicago, sauntered off with the Pulitzer Prize in 1925. “Show Boat,” set along the Mississippi River, inspired an oft-revived musical and three movies. And then there was her penultimate epic, in some ways her ultimate, published in 1952: “Giant,” about a Texas cattle rancher’s evolution throughout his long marriage to a more progressive Easterner, and much else besides.Its depiction of discrimination against Mexicans and the mores of the nouveau riche made many Texans very, very angry. (A woman who read an excerpt in Ladies’ Home Journal detected Ferber “trying to weave in the race prejudice you Northerners, especially Jews, are always raving about,” and declined to buy the book.) In one of her memoirs, “A Kind of Magic,” Ferber likened the general response to being publicly hanged and dropped through a sheet of glass: “cut into hamburgers.”The 1956 film version, directed by George Stevens in panoramic 35 millimeter and starring Rock Hudson as the rancher Bick Benedict, Elizabeth Taylor as his wife and James Dean as a ranch hand turned oil tycoon, was better received, won Stevens an Oscar and helped inspire the blockbuster television series “Dallas.”Ferber’s great-niece, Julie Gilbert, who wrote an excellent biography of her published in 1976 and is a novelist and playwright herself, has now gone back to focus on the development of this one work. Replete with interviews old and new and the comma-challenged, sometimes UPPERCASE notes and correspondence of its strong-willed subject, “Giant Love” is a tender and patient homage to a titan of American letters who has fallen most grievously out of fashion.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 Friendship Behind ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘Manhattan’

    In a Q&A, Woody Allen describes the years spent collaborating with his friend Marshall Brickman on beloved movies. Mr. Brickman died on Friday.In the mid-1970s, the writer and director Woody Allen was known for farcical movies about subjects like the search for the world’s best egg salad, but by then he felt he was done “just clowning around,” as he later told the film critic Stig Björkman.As he headed in a new artistic direction, he took a friend along for the ride: a folk musician-turned-humorist named Marshall Brickman.Together they worked on “Annie Hall” (1977), a comic but wistful remembrance of a failed relationship, and “Manhattan” (1979), which focused on characters struggling to find themselves in work and romance. The films came to be widely considered the two essential Woody Allen movies.Reviewers noticed that Mr. Allen had worked out a new style. In his review of “Manhattan,” the New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote, “Mr. Allen’s progress as one of our major filmmakers is proceeding so rapidly that we who watch him have to pause occasionally to catch our breath.”He didn’t achieve that progress by himself. After Mr. Brickman died on Friday, Mr. Allen spoke with The New York Times about their collaboration — a rare moment in his life, he said, when writing was not lonesome but rather comradely, pleasurable. A Q&A, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, is below.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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    Bob Bryar, Former Drummer for My Chemical Romance, Dies at 44

    He joined that pop-punk band in 2004 and played on its most successful album, “The Black Parade.”Bob Bryar, the former drummer for the rock band My Chemical Romance, which drew a large following with catchy hooks and a dark, misfit energy, has died. He was 44.Mr. Bryar’s death was confirmed by a spokesman for the band, who did not provide any additional details.Mr. Bryar joined My Chemical Romance in 2004. The band, led by the brothers Gerard and Mikey Way, had just released the record “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge,” which went platinum and helped build a following among fans of emo and pop punk.Mr. Bryar was perhaps best known for his drumming on the group’s 2006 landmark concept album, “The Black Parade,” which combined punk, glam and Broadway. It became the band’s most popular album.Mr. Bryar was born in Chicago on Dec. 30, 1979. He said in a 2008 video that he learned to play drums on a toy drum set, fell in love with the instrument and began playing in high school bands and at clubs around Chicago.He went on to study sound engineering at the University of Florida and later worked as a sound engineer for several bands. While working for the rock band the Used, Mr. Bryar met the members of My Chemical Romance.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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    New York Philharmonic Looks to Philadelphia for Its Next Leader

    Matías Tarnopolsky, who manages the Philadelphia Orchestra, will come to New York as the Philharmonic works to recover from a trying period.The New York Philharmonic announced on Monday that it had chosen a new president and chief executive: Matías Tarnopolsky, who currently leads the Philadelphia Orchestra.Tarnopolsky, 54, a veteran arts leader who oversaw the merger of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in 2021, said he saw potential for an “auspicious new chapter” in New York, pointing to the arrival in 2026 of the star maestro Gustavo Dudamel.“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help shape the future of the New York Philharmonic,” said Tarnopolsky, who begins an initial five-year contract in January. “I embrace it with all my heart.”Tarnopolsky will take the helm of the Philharmonic, America’s oldest symphony orchestra, at a critical time.The ensemble has been grappling with a series of challenges, including the sudden resignation in July of its previous chief executive, Gary Ginstling, after only a year on the job. Ginstling left amid friction with Dudamel, board members, staff and musicians. Since then, Deborah Borda, a veteran Philharmonic leader, has run the orchestra on an interim basis.Borda, who led the orchestra from 2017 to 2023, has worked to stabilize the organization. After months of tense negotiations, the administration reached a labor deal in September with musicians, offering 30 percent raises over three years. And last month, the orchestra, hoping to bring to an end a long-running issue, dismissed two players over accusations of sexual misconduct.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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    Kendrick Lamar’s ‘GNX’ Rockets to No. 1 on the Charts

    The rapper’s surprise LP tops Billboard’s album and singles charts, where “Squabble Up” blocked Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” from a historic 20th week of dominance.You never know when Kendrick Lamar will put out a new album, but when he does, it’s big news. His latest, “GNX,” is no exception, dominating rap’s fandom discourse and immediately taking over Billboard’s album and singles charts.Lamar’s sixth studio LP, “GNX” was a surprise release, on Nov. 22, and has sailed to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, becoming his fifth album to top the chart. It opened with the equivalent of 319,000 sales in the United States, including 380 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. That makes it one of the splashiest debuts of 2024, though it had lower overall numbers than albums by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter.Still, “GNX” has become yet another headline maker for Lamar, who earlier this year bested Drake in a rapid-fire volley of diss tracks. Fans have picked apart references to Lil Wayne’s complaints about Lamar taking the next Super Bowl halftime show, and Snoop Dogg commented on social media about the track “Wacced Out Murals,” whose lyrics cite a post by Snoop Dogg about a Drake song, “Taylor Made.”Tracks from “GNX” quickly took over the lists of top songs on streaming services, and they occupy the entire Top 5 of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, with “Squabble Up” at No. 1. It has blocked what would have been a historic week for Shaboozey’s country hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” — last week, Shaboozey’s song notched its 19th week at the top, tying the record set in 2019 by Lil Nas X with “Old Town Road” for the longest run on Billboard’s flagship singles chart, which dates to 1958.“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” falls to No. 6 on the singles chart, and the rest of the Top 5 all belongs to Lamar: “TV Off” (No. 2), “Luther” (No. 3), “Wacced Out Murals” (No. 4) and “Hey Now” (No. 5). According to Billboard, that feat has previously been accomplished only by the Beatles, Taylor Swift and … Drake, who claimed nine of the Top 10 in 2021, with songs from his album “Certified Lover Boy.” That week, Drake had every slot in the Top 10 except for No. 6. (Streaming has made such blanketing of the charts much easier than ever before, when chart positions were determined by sales and airplay.)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