Aurelia Butler

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    The American Tenor Jonathan Tetelman, a Puccini Specialist, Arrives at the Met

    Jonathan Tetelman will sing in “La Rondine” and “Madama Butterfly” in New York. He trained as a baritone and worked as a D.J. before finding his “authentic voice” as a tenor.In the middle of last summer’s production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” at the Salzburg Festival, the American tenor Jonathan Tetelman brought down the house. As Macduff, Tetelman gave a searing rendition of “Ah, la paterna mano,” the heartbreaking aria after his character learns that the bloodthirsty monarch has slaughtered his wife and children.Tetelman’s performance in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s monumentally gloomy production was one of the festival’s highlights. Later this month, the 35-year-old tenor will make his Metropolitan Opera debut in Puccini’s “La Rondine.” He’ll also be heard at the Met as Pinkerton in a revival of the composer’s better-known “Madama Butterfly” that reunites him with his “Macbeth” co-star, the soprano Asmik Grigorian, in April and May. (There are planned Met Live in HD broadcasts of both productions.)In an email, the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, wrote that Tetelman had a “beautiful and big voice that is perfectly suited to the generous size of the Met’s auditorium, which is much larger than most European opera houses, and to these soaring Puccini roles.”Tetelman has swiftly risen to become one of his generation’s most in-demand lyric tenors and is particularly sought after for his Puccini. After singing Rodolfo in “La Bohème” for the first time in 2017 in Fujian, China, he reprised the role a year later at Tanglewood (replacing the Polish star tenor Piotr Beczala) and then on opening night of Barrie Kosky’s production at the Komische Oper Berlin in January 2019.Tetelman played Macduff in a performance of “Macbeth” at the 2023 Salzburg Festival.Bernd Uhlig/SFBut Tetelman’s path to the Met’s stage was anything but typical. Born in Chile, Tetelman was adopted by an American couple when he was 6 months old and grew up in Princeton, N.J. As an undergraduate at the Manhattan School of Music, he trained as a baritone but felt frustrated.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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    Shakira on the Pain Behind Her New Album, ‘Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran’

    With “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran,” her first album in seven years, the Colombian superstar said she “transformed pain into productivity.”For Shakira, 2022 was a year of heartbreak. Decades of hit singles and groundbreaking Latin-pop crossovers couldn’t insulate the Colombian pop star from personal upheavals. In the glare of celebrity coupledom, she broke up with the soccer player Gerard Piqué, her partner for 11 years and the father of her two sons, Milan and Sasha. Her father was hospitalized twice for a fall that caused head trauma; he went on to require further brain surgery in 2023.Shakira was also facing charges of tax evasion in a long-running case disputing whether she had lived primarily in Spain from 2012 to 2014; she declared residency there in 2015. Last November, she settled for a fine of 7.5 million euros (about $8.2 million), citing “the best interest of my kids.” Just days earlier, Shakira had collected the Latin Grammy for song of the year for “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” a collaboration with the Argentine producer Bizarrap with wordplay clearly aimed at Piqué and his girlfriend.The song was one of a string of singles Shakira released that referred directly to the breakup: the sarcastic “Te Felicito” (“I Congratulate You”); the regretful “Monotonía” (“Monotony”); the Bizarrap session, “Acróstico,” a ballad promising her children that she’d stay strong; and “TQG” (“Te Quedó Grande,” roughly translated as “I’m Too Good for You”), a taunting reggaeton duet with the Colombian star Karol G, who had been through her own public breakup. “TQG” has racked up more than a billion streams.Those songs reappear on Shakira’s first album since 2017, “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” (“Women No Longer Cry”), due Friday. All but one of its tracks deal with romantic ups and (mostly) downs, honed into crisp, tuneful pop structures. The LP continues Shakira’s career-long penchant for pulling together music and collaborators from across the Americas, dipping into rock, electro-pop, trap, Dominican bachata, Nigerian-style Afrobeats and regional Mexican cumbia and polka. Her guests include Cardi B, Ozuna and Rauw Alejandro. Not one of them upstages Shakira, who’s playful or raw as each moment demands.Shakira spoke about the album from her white-walled kitchen at her home in Miami, where an air fryer sat on the counter behind her; a pet bunny in a pen was at her side. Unlike Barcelona, Miami is a hub of Latin pop where, she said, “I have the feeling I’ll be making a lot more music now.” Wearing a black tank top, with her hair in long blond waves, Shakira spoke happily and volubly about an album that, for her, was “alchemical.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Shakira faced charges of tax evasion in a long-running case disputing whether she had lived primarily in Spain from 2012 to 2014. Last November, she settled for a fine of 7.5 million euros (about $8.2 million).Josep Lago/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe 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: ‘The Shell Trial’ Seeks a Guilty Party in Climate Change

    Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s new opera, about events still in progress, finds fault and complicity in every player of a global blame game.The climate activist was tired. Protests at the house of Shell’s chief executive had led to little more than free cookies and the police being called to break things up. The same thing had happened the week before. And the week before that. And the week before that.“I don’t wanna be perfect,” they screamed into a loudspeaker in Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “The Shell Trial.” “I just don’t wanna die,” the activist added, with an expletive for emphasis.It was a moment of one person speaking for many, and for “The Shell Trial” itself, which premiered at the Dutch National Opera on Saturday. (Among the commissioners is Opera Philadelphia, where it will travel in a future season.) A Brechtian cri de coeur about climate change and complicity, this is an ambitious, passionate show that seems more interested in being heard — in truly reaching its audience — than in being an impeccably crafted work of art.Finding new ways to make old points, and powerfully laying out a vision for a future in which the world changes but we do not, “The Shell Trial” has much to admire. Remarkable, too, is the effort of the Dutch National Opera, which has taken a major step toward operating as a carbon-neutral house with this staging and its Green Deal, an initiative to weave sustainability into its productions, limit travel and calculate ways to offset its carbon footprint.Opera in the past century has become globalized in a way that, unsurprisingly, has made it a target of activists. The Dutch National Opera, like the creators of “The Shell Trial,” views climate change as an ethical issue as well as a political one. And as the company does its part to help, the wider industry should take note.The chorus of children was made up of performers from local schools and community programs.Marco Borggreve/Dutch National OperaWe 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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    Ariana Grande’s ‘Eternal Sunshine’ Is the Biggest Album of 2024 Yet

    The pop singer’s sixth No. 1 album opens at the top with the equivalent of 227,000 sales in the United States.Ariana Grande’s long-awaited new album, “Eternal Sunshine,” opens at the top of the latest Billboard chart with the biggest debut of the year so far, kicking off a season of expected blockbusters from Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa.“Eternal Sunshine,” Grande’s seventh studio album and her first in almost four years, starts at No. 1 with the equivalent of 227,000 sales in the United States, including 195 million streams and 77,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. After a first single, “Yes, And?,” went to No. 1 in January, the full album arrived with Grande performing on “Saturday Night Live” and then — along with Cynthia Erivo, her co-star in the upcoming two-part “Wicked” film — appearing as a presenter at the Oscars.“Eternal Sunshine” is Grande’s sixth No. 1 album. All of her studio LPs have gone to the top except “Dangerous Woman” in 2016, which was held at No. 2 by that year’s juggernaut, Drake’s “Views.”Since her last album, “Positions” (2020), Grande has been shooting an adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked,” in which she will play Glinda the Good. Production on the film was delayed first by the coronavirus and then by last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike; the first “Wicked” film is now set to be released in November.Grande’s first-week numbers are the best for any new album this year by a decent margin, topping Ye and Ty Dolla Sign’s “Vultures 1” (148,000). More big figures are on the horizon for Beyoncé’s country pivot, “Cowboy Carter,” due at the end of this month; Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department,” in April; and then Lipa’s “Radical Optimism,” in May.Also this week, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time,” which hit No. 1 for the 19th time last week, falls to No. 2. Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 3, “Vultures 1” is No. 4 and SZA’s “SOS” is No. 5. More

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    ‘Stormy’ Review: Stormy Daniels Traces How Trump Case Upended Her Life

    A new documentary on Stormy Daniels traces how fame, frenzy and legal battles involving a former president upended her life.The arrival of “Stormy,” a new documentary on Peacock, is timely. In several weeks, former President Donald J. Trump is scheduled to go on trial in a case in which he’s accused of covering up a 2016 payment to the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels. (The trial was originally supposed start in late March, but has now been delayed until at least mid-April.)The documentary uses interviews and observational footage to recount the legal saga from Daniels’s perspective. It begins with the requisite accounts of her upbringing, her introduction to the sex industry and the 2006 tryst she says she had with Trump. “Stormy” then pivots to the period after the story of Daniels’s allegation of a sexual encounter with Trump was made public, tracing how the sudden fame and frenzy upended her personal life.After so much media coverage, certain details of the events feel overly familiar. But the director, Sarah Gibson, is often able to put the episodes into fresh contexts. Take the rise and fall of Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s onetime lawyer, who in 2022 was convicted of stealing from her: Rather than merely rehashing Avenatti’s offenses, Gibson positions him amid a wave of supposed male allies.These men go on to betray Daniels in ways that range from vexing to existential. And in a startling twist, some of the film’s footage comes from another documentary — never released — whose director became briefly involved with Daniels while shooting.“I’m not that special. I feel like a hypocrite,” Daniels says in one scene, considering her newfound status as a liberal luminary while preparing for a strip club performance. The sentiment gestures at complex questions about misogyny, female power and sexual agency. “Stormy” wisely lets these issues linger rather than tying a bow over them.StormyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

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    Paul Simon Faced Unexpected Struggles. Cameras Were Rolling.

    The singer and songwriter invited Alex Gibney to capture the making of his album “Seven Psalms.” The filmmaker was surprised to find a musician losing his hearing.Paul Simon had only one request of the filmmaker undertaking “In Restless Dreams,” a documentary about his life: “He wanted the music to sound good,” the director and producer Alex Gibney said.Over the years, Gibney, 70, has told the stories of many lives, including Elizabeth Holmes’s (“The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley”), Lance Armstrong’s (“The Armstrong Lie”) and Dilawar’s, an Afghan farmer who was tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in 2002 (“Taxi to the Dark Side,” for which he won an Academy Award for best documentary feature). He’s taken on musical legends like James Brown, Janis Joplin and Frank Sinatra.The Simon film, however, came with the most tempting of offers: a chance to come out to the singer’s ranch in Wimberley, Texas, and film him as he worked on his latest album, “Seven Psalms,” which was released last year.“That sort of thing doesn’t happen often at all,” Gibney said. “I got myself down to Texas as quickly as possible.”“In Restless Dreams,” which premiered on Sunday on MGM+ (for TV viewers, the film is split in two, with the second half airing March 24), begins with Simon’s earliest days growing up in Queens, N.Y., as he and his onetime musical partner Art Garfunkel learned to harmonize by listening to the Everly Brothers. We see Simon (and sometimes Garfunkel) create beloved albums including “Sounds of Silence,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Graceland”; perform in Central Park in 1981, a concert that attracted half a million fans and led to a brief reunion of the duo; and tackle everything from movie soundtracks (“The Graduate”) to acting roles (“One-Trick Pony”).There are several scenes of Simon working on some of American pop music’s most memorable tunes in a manner that has long impressed contemporaries like Wynton Marsalis, who met Simon in 2002. “He has a mystical understanding,” Marsalis said in a video interview. “He can see the timeless through the specific.”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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    A Filmmaker Needed a Quiet Place to Write. Where Better Than a Tuscan Villa?

    TWO YEARS AGO, the Spanish filmmaker Albert Moya came to Florence to visit an artist friend who’d unwittingly become the caretaker of a large family estate, left empty after a famous Italian writer died, on the outskirts of town. Moya was staying nearby, at the tumbledown hotel Torre di Bellosguardo, when he learned that another unlikely (and quite strange) residence had become available. It was in the area — the southwestern Florentine hills, quiet and almost suburban, where families have long purchased properties with views of the Duomo — so Moya decided to stop by. “Anyone who lives here looks at the market all the time,” he says over espresso one frosty December morning. “There’s nothing [available], really. So when something comes up, it’s kind of pornographic.”For the filmmaker Albert Moya’s apartment in Villa di Marignolle, in Florence, Italy, the architect Guillermo Santomà designed a carpeted dining table lit from below and a blue velvet curtain to match.Ricardo LabougleMoya and Santomà created separate spaces in the multipurpose living room — one area for lounging, one for editing films and, upstairs, an area for working out.Ricardo LabougleThe director, 34, was raised in a village of 800 people outside of Barcelona, but has spent most of his adulthood in New York and Paris, where he creates videos for luxury brands like Loewe and Louis Vuitton. He entered the fashion world accidentally: The Belgian designer Dries Van Noten was the first to hire him, after seeing his 2012 short, “American Autumn,” about a group of New York City schoolchildren hosting a Surrealist dinner party. Moya had come to Italy in part to work on the script for his debut feature — “about three brothers and their daddy issues, basically” — based on an idea he discussed with the Athens-based screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, best known for collaborating with the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos on films like “The Lobster” (2015).The entrance to Moya’s apartment retains the original frescoed ceiling. The birch chairs are by Frama.Ricardo LabougleA low platform bed covered in an alpaca fur blanket.Ricardo LabougleMoya initially planned to find a more permanent home in Paris after his working holiday. Instead, after visiting the 2,475-square-foot apartment, he decided to stay in Florence so he could write in solitude. When he toured the rental, “it was full of crap but empty of people,” he says, noting that the last occupant, who bought the place in the 1970s and still owns it, was an Italian soccer player who “had this amazing taste and awareness of space and architecture.” Situated on the sunny second floor, it was one of four flats parceled out in the 1950s from a 14th-century Tuscan estate, Villa di Marignolle, that once belonged to the Medicis. The astronomer Galileo Galilei stayed here several times in the 17th century, until the family of artistic patrons eventually sold it off. Perhaps to counterbalance the house’s intact Renaissance-era frescoes, oak window frames and doors and large garden crowded with cypress trees, the owner had decorated most of the rooms with various types of shiny but handsome wood paneling for the floors, the arches that divide them and the railings of two lofted interior balconies. Those levels are reached via their own staircases at either end of the cavernous, 50-by-16-foot living area, from which the sole bedroom and small kitchen and bathroom branch out. “I like empty spaces and complete austerity because I travel for work. When I’m home, I want calm,” Moya says. “But here, the question was, ‘How do we respect the woodwork?’”A 2022 installation by Moya and the designer Guillermo Santomà.Albert MoyaWe 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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    Gossip Dance Back Into Action After a 12-Year Pause

    The trio fronted by Beth Ditto wasn’t sure it would return after scattering in different directions. But music united them for a new LP, “Real Power.”It’s possible that there are better people to dig you out of an ice storm than the frontwoman of a dance-punk act, but few would do it as resourcefully or cheerfully as Beth Ditto. Since her band Gossip started 25 years ago, its scrappy, D.I.Y. roots have always run strong.Early this year, when Portland, Ore., Ditto’s adopted home of two decades, was overtaken by a deep freeze, my windshield was a sheet of ice, and there was no scraper in sight (do better, Portland rental car agencies). Over my protestations, Ditto fished out her old ID, hopped out of the slowly warming sedan in her black beret and Chuck Taylors, and shaved the ice off herself. She has never been fazed, she said, by the unexpected.Though Gossip has been a major label act since 2009, when it made the leap from the storied indie Kill Rock Stars to Columbia Records and the megaproducer Rick Rubin, the trio has carved out a very unconventional path.“We’re renegades,” said Ditto, who founded the group with her childhood friend Nathan Howdeshell on guitar and bass, chatting with her bandmates in the drummer Hannah Blilie’s minimalist, midcentury living room, cozy against the wintry mix outside. They had gathered to talk about “Real Power,” their first album together in 12 years. Due Friday, its arrival was not preordained, or even serendipitous — it was more instinctual, a product of punk energy, somehow sustained across time, space and adulthood.“We don’t plan,” said Howdeshell, who grew up with Ditto in small-town Arkansas. “Me and Beth just sit down and made up stuff.” They don’t talk about it, either. That might ruin it, make it feel contrived, Ditto said.“That’s the magic of our band, I think,” Blilie added. “It just kind of falls into place.”That is, until it didn’t.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