Aurelia Butler

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    Sting on Setting His Music to Dance in Message in a Bottle

    In “Message in a Bottle,” a dance show opening at City Center, Sting’s songbook helps tell the story of a family fleeing conflict.When the choreographer Kate Prince set out several years ago to create a dance show based on the music of Sting, she was unsure what story she might be able to tell using his varied songbook.Then she saw photos of young Syrian refugees taking desperate risks to reach safety in Europe, and she had an idea. She would use some of Sting’s and the Police’s most affecting music, songs like “Desert Rose” and “Every Breath You Take,” to tell the story of a family displaced by war.The result is “Message in a Bottle,” which premiered in London in 2020 and comes to New York City Center in Manhattan for a two-week run beginning on Tuesday. In the nearly two-hour show, featuring Prince’s dance company, ZooNation, she draws on freestyle dance, salsa, Lindy Hop, street dance and other styles to bring to life 27 songs.“People get married to my songs, people play my songs at funerals,” Sting said. “I’m always happy that they have a function. And here the function is to tell an important, worthy, wonderful story.”In a recent interview at City Center, Prince, Sting and the composer and arranger Alex Lacamoire discussed the refugee crisis, the challenge of setting Sting’s music to dance and the role of art in times of conflict. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.A scene from “Message in a Bottle,” which had its premiere in London in 2020. Sting said he is “always happy” that his songs have a function “and here the function is to tell an important, worthy, wonderful story.”Helen MaybanksWe 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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    Student Orchestra Shouts ‘Mambo!’ and Meets Gustavo Dudamel

    Our photographer followed 95 young musicians for six days as they prepared to perform with Dudamel, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic.The student musicians, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, were rehearsing an excerpt from “West Side Story” in a high school auditorium one recent afternoon. Then, as the trumpets blared and the timpani went wild, a voice broke out from the conductor’s podium.“Oy yo yo yo yo yo yo,” said the superstar maestro Gustavo Dudamel, who was leading the rehearsal. “You are not dancing together.”Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, paused for a moment, telling the students they needed a more precise rhythm and sound. Then he put his hands in his pockets and swaggered around the stage.Dudamel, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, guided the youth ensemble, telling the students they needed a more precise rhythm and sound.James Estrin/The New York Times“This is cool, really cool music,” he said, eliciting laughter from the students. “We need something that goes with the nature of the body.”The students, part of a 95-member youth ensemble nominated by schools and arts programs and assembled by the New York Philharmonic, were at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan for six days last week. They were preparing for a concert on Friday with Dudamel, who has vowed to expand the Philharmonic’s presence in schools and in the community when he takes over in 2026.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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    Taylor Swift Debuts at No. 1 on Billboard 200 With ‘Tortured Poets Department’

    Only the Beatles have more No. 1 LPs now: The pop superstar reigns atop the Billboard 200 for the 14th time with the equivalent of 2.6 million album sales.There was never any doubt that Taylor Swift’s latest release, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was going to be big. The question was just how big.And the answer is, gigantic.“The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift’s 11th studio album, opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart with historic numbers, including huge results in streaming and vinyl sales. It is Swift’s 14th chart-topping title, tying her with Jay-Z for the second-most No. 1 albums by any act in the 68-year history of Billboard’s flagship album chart; only the Beatles, with 19, have more.In its first week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 2.6 million album sales in the United States, according to Luminate, which tracks the data behind Billboard’s charts. That is the biggest overall first-week take for any album since Adele’s “25” in 2015, which opened with nearly 3.5 million, driven by in-store CD sales.The “equivalent” figure is a composite, based on a formula used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various ways listeners now buy and consume music. And in each way, “Tortured Poets” was a smash.It sold 1.9 million copies in traditional album sales, including 859,000 for vinyl alone, which blew away Swift’s own previous record of 693,000 LPs, set just six months ago. Advance sales through Swift’s website — begun the day Swift announced the album, at the Grammy Awards — were key. She offered an array of tinted vinyl variants and CDs, some in “deluxe” versions advertised with autographs or on-brand trinkets like engraved bookmarks that went for as much as $50 apiece. According to Billboard, 1.4 million copies of the album were sold on its first day, many preordered over the last two months.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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    Jazz Saved the Bassist Luke Stewart. Now He’s Working to Rescue Others.

    Stewart’s many projects — Silt Trio, Irreversible Entanglements, Blacks’ Myths and others — make strong statements and foster community. A new LP is out Friday.On a Sunday afternoon in March, Luke Stewart — a bassist and composer who has gradually emerged as a galvanic force in the contemporary jazz vanguard — stood at the corner of Pine and Broadway, in Manhattan’s Financial District, running down some local history. He pointed across the street, where the American Stock Exchange sat next to Trinity Church, and noted our proximity to the former site of New York’s municipal slave market.“You see this pattern really all over the world,” Stewart said, “where literally people are taken from the auction block, where we started, right down here to be saved in the church and sold, and then sent off to wherever they’re going.”Stewart is wont to drop deep knowledge, whether he’s pointing out the sites of bygone jazz lofts in NoHo or spontaneously unpacking a Ravel score at the New School, where he is an adjunct professor. Sitting in the university’s performing-arts library, he traced the arcs of the notes with his fingers, posing rhetorical questions in his deep, faintly drawly voice: “What kind of emotion did the composer want?” “What was going on then?” “What is classical music, anyway?”Stewart, 37, chuckled at the increasing loftiness of his inquiries, but his point was serious: always dig deeper — an ethos he seems eager to pass on to listeners. Introducing an interdisciplinary performance earlier in the month under his platform Union of Universal Unity, he urged the audience to “Leave here changed.”Onstage, in each of his many projects, the tall, goateed bassist is a riveting presence. On Friday, he’ll release “Unknown Rivers,” the third album by his group Silt Trio — featuring Warren Crudup III (known as Trae) and Chad Taylor trading off on drums, as well as the tenor saxophonist Brian Settles — which makes a persuasive case for Stewart as both a composer of concise, memorable themes and a speaker-rattling powerhouse on his instrument.Stewart onstage at the HSA Theater Harlem School of the Arts in Manhattan in 2022.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe 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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    How They Served the Tennis Scenes in ‘Challengers’

    Painstaking effort went into building the energetic competition moments in Luca Guadagnino’s love-triangle tennis drama. Here’s a closer look at the process.“Let’s not make a tennis film.”That was the director Luca Guadagnino’s unconventional approach to “Challengers,” the hit movie starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor as rival tennis aces, locked in a high-stakes love triangle.Guadagnino, the Italian director known for his deft eroticism (“Call Me By Your Name”), didn’t want it to look like tennis usually does, with a static camera positioned behind the player who is serving, or a wide shot of the court. “That kind of televisual stillness — there’s objectivity,” he said, “which is exactly the opposite of what I was going after.”Instead, he wanted the action to mirror the characters’ complicated and sweaty dynamic — for viewers to feel like they were inside the competition, which is as much metaphor as sport. “We were asking ourselves all the time, are we really giving a kinetic experience, an intimate experience, for an audience? And are we translating that into something that can emotionally resonate?” he said in a recent video interview.But when production started, Guadagnino was a neophyte: “I was completely ignorant about tennis,” he said. Perhaps that’s why he was able to envision unique shots, like one that is below the net, or another where the camera is the ball, giving a spinning view as it hurtles across the court.Revved by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno score, the visuals are naturalism on overdrive. But even with an assist from special effects, the tennis proved hard to shoot; the 10-minute finale game took eight months to produce. It was, Guadagnino said, “a very, very, very laborious movie.”In separate video interviews, Guadagnino, the Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Brad Gilbert, the American tennis pro turned coach and commentator, who served as a consultant on the film, explained how they created the vigorous love-set-match moments.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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    Review: Asmik Grigorian’s Met Opera Debut in ‘Butterfly’

    Asmik Grigorian, a star singer abroad, made her Metropolitan Opera debut by lending lyricism, complexity and spontaneity to a classic role.In the most heartbreaking scene of Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly,” the title character waits. A teenage geisha married off to an American naval lieutenant, she remains devoted to him long after he abandons her. He will return, she believes — one fine day.When she sees his ship approaching the shores of Japan, she and her maid ecstatically prepare the home for him. They gather flowers and spread them at the door; Butterfly rouges her cheeks and puts on the wedding garments she wore the night she and the lieutenant fell in love. Then she, their son and the maid look out through a screen and wait. The boy falls asleep first, followed by the maid. But Butterfly stays awake all night, expecting a husband who never comes.Moments like this are perfect for the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian, a fiercely intelligent and captivating singer who made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday. She comes to New York having already reached star status abroad, and it didn’t take long in “Butterfly” to see why.After Grigorian knelt to wait, she smiled at her son, played by an affecting bunraku puppet. Then she let out a deep exhale and perfected her posture before reaching out to hold the hand of her maid, Suzuki. As the scene went on, her eyes seemed on the verge of tears, but only on the verge. She appeared overwhelmed with either anticipation or disappointment, or both.Opera is known for its elevated expression, of which there is plenty in “Butterfly,” a tragedy from start to finish. But Grigorian is the type of singer who also behaves like a skilled, nuanced actress. She persuasively inhabits a character, imbuing performances of plush lyricism with empathy, sophistication and even a touch of spontaneity.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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    Review: Gustavo Dudamel Saves the Day at the Philharmonic

    Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s incoming music and artistic director, stepped in after a guest conductor fell ill.It was lucky that Gustavo Dudamel was in town.On April 20, the New York Philharmonic announced that Juanjo Mena, who was scheduled to conduct the orchestra in three sold-out concerts starting on Thursday, had fallen ill. Dudamel, the ensemble’s incoming music and artistic director, was already expecting to be around to lead the spring gala on Wednesday.And so he saved the day. Stepping in for Mena, Dudamel, who assumes his Philharmonic post in 2026, led, in his only subscription concert appearances this season, a dichotomous program of dazzling crowd-pleasers and a thorny modernist work with utmost finesse. Pieces by Ravel and Pablo de Sarasate shone as they should, and the evening’s unlikely centerpiece, Ginastera’s Violin Concerto, was a 30-minute fever dream of serialist fancies and ferocities. (“Ibéria,” from Debussy’s “Images for Orchestra,” was cut after Mena bowed out.)An evening built from Spanish-tinged French pieces could have slipped into fiery and fragrant clichés, but instead it demonstrated the musical values that the Philharmonic’s audience can expect from Dudamel, including snappy rhythms, neatly managed transitions and fortes so punchy, they could leave a mark on your cheek. Orchestral tuttis had clarity and body from top to bottom.Dudamel used Ravel’s exquisite interplay of instrumental timbres to enliven the moods of “Rapsodie Espagnole,” which opened the concert. Sharply vivid rather than suggestively chimerical, the scenes and dances had a trim, finely honed character. Dudamel’s clockwork sophistication was better suited to the concert’s closer, Ravel’s beloved “Boléro,” in which he methodically developed tonal richness, sculpted the sound and dialed up the intensity over the piece’s 15-minute span. The sudden, layered climax had the effect of a tsunami: hitting and washing over the auditorium at the same time.The Philharmonic, which Dudamel will lead more frequently next season before officially undertaking his duties, is already showing signs of his influence. And he collaborated seamlessly with the evening’s soloist, the violinist Hilary Hahn, the orchestra’s artist in residence.A musician of poise and rounded tone, Hahn proved in the Ginastera that she can make just about anything sound beautiful. In her interpretation, the piece shed its acrid angularity. She folded trills, stops and sweet harmonics into unbroken lines, and when she harmonized with herself, she utilized the plushness and patience familiar from her Bach recordings.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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    With ‘Challengers’ and ‘Saltburn,’ Hollywood Movies Embrace Sex Again

    Studios obsessively focused on PG-13 franchises and animation in recent years, but movies like “Challengers” and “Saltburn” show eroticism has returned.Zendaya, clad in a skintight dress, gyrates on a dance floor in “Challengers,” a $56 million sports drama that arrived in multiplexes on Friday. “It’s getting hot in here,” the hip-hop soundtrack intones, as she closes her eyes and runs her hands through her hair, lost in fantasy. “So take off all your clothes.”The story continues at a motel, where Zendaya, playing a tennis prodigy, begins a ménage à trois with two guys; it fizzles after they become more interested in each other. The plot moves on — to sultry interplay on the hood of a car, in a dorm room, in the back seat of a car, on the wooden slats of a sauna. There is erotic churro eating.“Sex is back!” shouted an apparently elated man at the conclusion of a prerelease “Challengers” screening in West Hollywood, Calif., this month.Trend spotting in cinema is a hazardous pursuit. Think about how many times the rom-com has been declared dead — and alive — and dead. (No, wait, alive.) But this much can be said with surety: Hollywood is hornier than it has been in years.“It absolutely feels like the pendulum has swung back toward filmmakers exploring adult relationships and sexuality in their projects,” said Amy Pascal, the former chairwoman of Sony Pictures and producing force behind “Challengers.”“I welcome that,” she added.Eroticism was common in studio hits like “Basic Instinct,” starring Sharon Stone, in the 1980s and ’90s.Rialto PicturesWe 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