Aurelia Butler

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    Beyoncé Takes on Italian Opera for ‘Cowboy Carter’ Track ‘Daughter’

    On the star’s new album, the track “Daughter” includes her take on an 18th-century Italian song most often heard in classical music recitals.You don’t need opera glasses to see that Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” takes on more than just country music.Nearly two minutes into “Daughter,” a track of ballad-like storytelling, she inserts a famous operatic song from the 18th century: “Caro Mio Ben.” And, in Beyoncé fashion, she makes it her own.Singers of all vocal types have performed “Caro Mio Ben”; most of them have been from the opera world, including it on recital programs. But as the song has been adapted for high and low ranges, its sound has stayed more or less the same.It was written in the early 1780s by a member of the Giordano family. At different points it has been attributed to Giuseppe or his likely older brother Tommaso. (This history is all a bit hazy.) And, like many Italian arias and songs, its lyric is brief. The singer expresses heartache in the absence of a loved one, and begs for the end of a conflict with them before returning to the sentiment of the pain caused by loss.Like much music of longing and sorrow from this time — such as the sadly beautiful arias of Mozart’s operas — “Caro Mio Ben” is in a major key, and has endured as such for more than two centuries as a concert and recording staple. But that’s also where Beyoncé comes in.“Daughter” excerpts “Caro Mio Ben” as a bridge and distorts its major-key atmosphere into a minor one to fit with the rest of the song. After opening with a moody guitar ostinato, Beyoncé enters with the dark, melodramatic storytelling of a murder ballad, with a refrain like something out of “Carmen” in its bravado and rustic flavor. In Beyoncé’s “If you cross me, I’m just like my father/I am colder than Titanic water,” you can hear a spiritual descendant of Carmen’s warning to “be on your guard” from another opera classic, the Habanera.Beyoncé keeps “Caro Mio Ben” in its original Italian, but its melancholy and yearning get across the feeling of the text, which complicates the rest of the song, introducing to her toughness a vulnerability and desire for peace — most ardent in the wailing and ghostly vocalise, or wordless singing, that follows.She doesn’t have the voice of an opera singer, but that doesn’t really matter. “Caro Mio Ben” is not an aria from opera; it is a song, and was most likely performed in its time in intimate settings, with the comparatively direct, human-scale sound you hear in “Daughter.” What’s more significant is that Beyoncé finds in this old tune a quality shared by the finest music from any century: something to say. More

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    A Georgia Town Basks in Bountiful Filming. The State Pays.

    When movies are made in Thomasville, Ga., it welcomes celebrities and an infusion of cash. But the financial incentives that attract studios have cost the state billions.It is no wonder that moviemakers saw potential in Thomasville, Ga., as a stand-in for Main Street U.S.A. Cobblestone streets and mom-and-pop stores speckle the downtown of this city of 18,000 that is caked in red clay soil and nestled among rolling hills.Just as attractive to some of those producers are Georgia’s lavish filming incentives, which have made Thomasville a cost-effective place to make modest pictures with major stars. Dustin Hoffman came for the rom-com “Sam & Kate.” A children’s book adaptation, “The Tiger Rising,” brought Dennis Quaid and Queen Latifah to town.But what is good on the ground for local economies — Thomasville says each of the six movies filmed there has provided an economic boost of about $1 million — can simultaneously be a drain on state coffers.Some Georgia lawmakers wondered whether it might be wise to put some limits on an uncapped tax incentive program that has given billions of dollars to Hollywood studios, scrambling this week in hopes of passing a bill that would modify the program. More

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    Stream These 12 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in April

    A Ryan Gosling detective comedy, a Formula One racing drama and the romantic musical “Mamma Mia!” are among the movies exiting the streaming service.Fast cars, jazz drummers, time travelers, bounty hunters — you’ll find everything but the kitchen sink in this month’s roundup of noteworthy titles leaving Netflix in the United States. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘The Nice Guys’ (April 8)Stream it here.Ryan Gosling is having a bit of a moment — he may not have won the Oscar for best supporting actor, but he won the Oscars telecast for his performance of “I’m Just Ken” — and those who prefer the intense actor in his loosey-goosey comic mode would be wise to check out this 2016 comedy-mystery. Gosling stars as a bumbling private detective who teams up with a bone-breaker-for-hire (an uproariously gregarious Russell Crowe) to solve a convoluted missing person case. The co-writer and director is Shane Black, who helped popularize the buddy-action comedy with his “Lethal Weapon” screenplay, and subsequently perfected it here and in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Keep an eye out for the up-and-comers Angourie Rice (“Mean Girls”) and Margaret Qualley (“Drive Away Dolls”) in supporting roles.‘Rush’ (April 15)Stream it here.Ron Howard spent a fair amount of his youth appearing in vroom-vroom car movies like “American Graffiti,” “Eat My Dust” and “Grand Theft Auto” — the latter marking his feature directorial debut — so it’s not surprising that he was drawn to this thrilling dramatization of the mid-70s glory days of Formula One racing. He tells the story of a rivalry between two of the sport’s stars: James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), a study in contrasts, the matinee idol and the ugly duckling, the party boy and the teetotaler. The nuanced screenplay by Peter Morgan (who penned Howard’s earlier “Frost/Nixon,” and would go on to create “The Crown”) mines the complexities of their relationship, while the thrilling race sequences effectively place us in the driver’s seat through the hairiest moments of trading paint.‘Synchronic’ (April 15)Stream it here.Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead make brainy sci-fi pictures, small-scale indie movies like “The Endless” and “Something in the Dirt” that traffic in ideas over special effects. This 2019 effort was the closest they’ve come to a play for the cinematic mainstream, casting Marvel mainstay Anthony Mackie and “Fifty Shades” star Jamie Dornan in the leading roles. But their signature style and thematic occupations remain thankfully intact in this tale of two New Orleans paramedics who discover the mind-bending effects of a new designer drug. The central conceit is ingenious, but the filmmakers don’t just rely on its cleverness; there are genuine, human stakes, and the payoff is refreshingly poignant.‘The Hateful Eight’ (April 24)Stream it here.Quentin Tarantino followed “Django Unchained” by again riffing on the venerable Western genre, this time by crossing it with the Agatha Christie-style “locked room” mystery. He populates his story, of a poisoning in a tucked-away haberdashery during a deadly blizzard in the post-Civil War West, with faces familiar from his previous films, including Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen; they’re joined by an Oscar-nominated Jennifer Jason Leigh, in a particularly foul-mouthed and ill-tempered mood. Tempers flare, blood is shed and vulgarities fly in typical Tarantino fashion, but in its unflinching portraiture of the racial hostilities of a splintered country, the work is by no means exclusive to its period setting. (Also leaving on April 24: the Netflix-exclusive “The Hateful Eight Extended Version,” which adds footage and breaks the film up into four one-hour episodes.)‘Malignant’ (April 26)Stream it here.James Wan started out directing bone-crunching horror pictures like “Saw,” “Insidious” and “The Conjuring” before going mainstream with “Furious 7,” “Aquaman” and its sequel. Between those two superhero flicks, he directed this gloriously unhinged, go-for-broke horror thriller, in which a young woman (Annabelle Wallis) is haunted by visions of grisly murders — visions that prove to be true, and suggest some sort of a psychic link to the brutal killer. If that sounds slightly peculiar, boy, just you wait. The screenplay by “M3GAN” writer Akela Cooper (with story assists from Wan and Ingrid Bisu) is an admirably unrestrained trip into the genre’s wilder corners, full of inventive kills, bananas story turns and cuckoo supporting characters, all rendered in a baroque, hurdy-gurdy visual style.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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    How Many Easters Remain for This Century-Old Boys’ Choir School?

    St. Thomas Church in New York is considering closing its renowned boarding school for choristers, one of only a few in the world, because of financial woes.At the St. Thomas Choir School in Manhattan the other morning, more than two dozen boys, dressed in matching white polo shirts and gray pants, gathered in a gymnasium to rehearse hymns for Holy Week services, as their predecessors have for more than a century.When Jeremy Filsell, the church’s organist and director of music, asked the boys for more precision when they sang the line about “the voice of an angel calling out” from “Sive Vigilem” by the Renaissance composer William Mundy, the boys tried again, their high, clear voices ringing out in Latin.“Lovely!” he said. “That’s it!”For 105 years, the St. Thomas Choir School has been something of an anomaly: a residential school that steeps boys in centuries-old choral traditions that are more generally associated with the great English cathedral towns than they are with Midtown Manhattan. The boys, between the ages of 8 and 14, live at the school and sing five services a week at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue.Now St. Thomas, an Episcopal church that is venerated for its music program, is considering closing the choir school, one of only a few remaining boarding schools for young choristers in the world. The church said that its endowment, annual fund-raising and tuition fees were no longer sufficient to cover the roughly $4 million a year it costs to operate the school — which accounts for about 29 percent of the church’s $14 million budget.The church will decide by October whether it will keep the school open beyond June 2025.The church will decide by October whether it will keep the school open beyond June 2025.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe Rev. Canon Carl F. Turner, the church’s rector, said that St. Thomas had run into trouble in part because of the misperception that it had ample resources, which has hurt fund-raising. The church, built from limestone in the French High Gothic style, stands 95 feet tall in the shadow of skyscrapers along Fifth Avenue, in one of New York’s most elegant neighborhoods.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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    Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Is Here, and It’s Much More Than Country

    The superstar’s new LP is a 27-track tour of popular music with a Beatles cover, cameos by Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, and features from Miley Cyrus and Post Malone.Beyoncé has gone country, sure … but it turns out that’s only the half of it.For months, the superstar, who made her name in R&B and pop, has been telegraphing her version of country music and style. There was the “disco” cowboy hat at her Renaissance World Tour last year, and her “western” look at the Grammys in February, complete with a white Stetson and black studded jacket. Then, on the night of the Super Bowl, she released two new songs, and sent one of them, “Texas Hold ’Em” — with plucked banjos and lines about Texas and hoedowns — to country radio stations, sparking an industrywide debate about the defensive moat that has long surrounded Nashville’s musical institutions.At midnight on Friday, Beyoncé finally released her new album, “Cowboy Carter,” and the country bona fides were certainly there. Dolly Parton provides a cameo introduction to Beyoncé’s version of “Jolene,” Parton’s 1972 classic about a woman confronting a romantic rival. Willie Nelson pops in twice as a grizzled D.J., who says he “turns you on to some real good [expletive],” including snippets of Chuck Berry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the blues singer Son House.Yet “Cowboy Carter” is far broader than simply a country album. Beyoncé does a version of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and, on the track “Ya Ya,” draws from Nancy Sinatra and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” “Desert Eagle” is glistening funk, and the upbeat “Bodyguard” would not be out of place on a modern rock radio station. The album’s range suggests a broad essay on contemporary pop music, and on the nature of genre itself.That theory is made clear on the partly spoken track “Spaghettii,” featuring the pioneering but long absent Black country singer Linda Martell, who in 1970 released an album called “Color Me Country.”“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? Yes, they are,” Martell, 82, says. “In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”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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    ‘Romancing the Stone’ and Its Screenwriter’s Tragic Tale

    Diane Thomas was a waitress when she made headlines for the script sale of what would become a box office smash. But the Cinderella story had a sad ending.Each day, before her waitressing shift began, Diane Thomas would plop herself onto the floor of her tiny Malibu studio apartment, in front of a low-slung desk, and begin typing. Throughout late 1978 and early 1979, she worked daily, hours on end, conjuring the tale of Joan Chase, a mousy romance novelist suddenly thrust into a life-or-death adventure.“I wanted to write about a woman who became her own heroine,” Thomas would offer of her inspiration. “The notion that we can be whatever we imagine ourselves to be interested me.”Forty years ago, Thomas’s story, “Romancing the Stone” — and its heroine, renamed Joan Wilder — reached big screens, becoming one of the top box office hits of 1984 and an enduring classic, owing to a perfectly measured blend of action, comedy and romance. “It’s still the most well-rounded script I’ve ever read,” Michael Douglas, the film’s producer and co-star, said in an interview. “In many ways, it was a reflection of Diane — she wasn’t quite as shy as Joan Wilder, but she poured a lot of herself into this story of a writer who experiences a metamorphosis.”During a golden era of action-adventure pictures, the novice Thomas turned the genre on its head. “A woman being the impetus for that kind of movie hadn’t been done, certainly not in that way,” said Kathleen Turner, who played Wilder. “I mean, the girls in those types of movies were just that — they were always sidekicks or scenery.”Thomas’s friends, like her fellow writer Betty Spence, said the sweep of the story — which moved from the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan to the raw jungles of South America — was the product of a fertile imagination. “Diane was a pure storyteller,” Spence said. “She could sit there and spin a tale out of nothing, and it would have a perfect beginning, middle and end.”When Thomas sold her script in the summer of 1979, she went from minimum-wage worker to one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. It was the start of a meteoric career that would include a pair of major movie hits and multiple projects with Steven Spielberg. Yet “Romancing the Stone” would be the only film to ever bear a Thomas writing credit because her life was tragically cut short.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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    Holst’s ‘The Planets’ Was a Hit, and a Team Effort

    In 1916, the composer Gustav Holst took a young conductor, Adrian Boult, on a long walk through Kew Gardens and Richmond Park in London. A few years earlier, Boult had written to Holst asking whether he had composed any music for small orchestra that he could perform. On this day, though, they discussed a much grander prospect: a suite for large orchestra that would become “The Planets.”Holst arranged for Boult to hear a version of the piece at the piano, played by two of his colleagues, Vally Lasker and Nora Day. Few were better equipped than they were to introduce Boult to the score; as rehearsal pianists, amanuenses, copyists and performers, the two would be intimately involved in the creation of “The Planets,” one of the most popular orchestral pieces of the 20th century.Documents from Lasker’s archive at the Royal College of Music in London show that this way of introducing “The Planets” to other artists wasn’t so unusual in its genesis. In an introduction to the piece given by Lasker on BBC radio in 1951, she said, “We had the great joy of introducing the work to all the great conductors in this country, and, after the war, to many of the great continental conductors.”Karl Straube, Paul von Klenau and Wilhelm Furtwängler were among the international figures who heard early versions of “The Planets” played by Lasker and Day. The pair also helped Boult get up to speed as he agreed at short notice to conduct the work’s premiere to selected guests in 1918. (Six decades years later, Boult would make his fifth and final recording of “The Planets.”)In January 1920, Lasker and Day played “The Planets” for Ralph Vaughan Williams, Holst’s friend and close musical associate, and by the time the work received its full public premiere later that year, by Albert Coates and the London Symphony Orchestra, the music already had many important admirers.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 Decline of Sean Combs’ Revolt TV and Other Business Ventures

    A restless ambition took him from hip-hop to the Met Gala, a reality show, a fashion label, a fragrance line and his own cable network. Then came the accusations and federal raids.Long before he was accused of sexual misconduct in a series of lawsuits, and long before federal agents in military gear raided his homes in Miami and Los Angeles, Sean Combs was unforgivable.That was the name he had selected for his first fragrance, which he sold through a partnership with Estée Lauder.It was promoted as a scent that “exudes the energy, sexiness and elegance of Sean Combs,” and he was supposed to give it a publicity boost in April 2006 by ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange alongside William Lauder, the Estée Lauder chief executive, and Terry Lundgren, the head of Federated Department Stores.But Mr. Combs didn’t arrive in time for the opening of the market, saying he had been stuck in traffic. So his fellow business titans did the honors without him.By then, Mr. Combs had successfully made the transition from Puff Daddy to the world’s most successful hip-hop mogul.Soon after the launch of his fragrance, Unforgivable, Mr. Combs appeared at the New York Stock Exchange with, from left to right: Todd Kahn, an executive at Sean John; John Demsey, the president of Sean John Fragrances; John Thain, the head of the N.Y.S.E.; Terry Lundgren, the chief executive of Federated Department Stores; and William Lauder, the chief executive of Estée Lauder.Seth Wenig/ReutersWe 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