Aurelia Butler

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    Aribert Reimann, Masterful German Opera Composer, Is Dead at 88

    His works, which were radically individual, were among the most celebrated of the late 20th and early 21st century.Aribert Reimann, whose powerful operas based on works by Shakespeare, Kafka, Lorca and others made him one of the most significant opera composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, died on Wednesday in Berlin. He was 88.His publisher, Schott Music, announced the death.A prolific composer with widely performed works, particularly his operas and songs, Mr. Reimann (pronounced RYE-mahn) was revered for his ability to fuse complex and often challenging modern music with lyrical texts. His works were frequently devastating in their emotional impact, sounding like organic expressions of the human voice.“Like few other composers of his generation, Reimann knew how to tell stories in his operas which directly affected us humans living in the 21st century,” Dietmar Schwarz, the manager of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, said in a statement.Mr. Reimann enjoyed a close relationship with the opera house. Five of his stage works were performed there, most recently his ninth and final completed opera, “L’Invisible,” which was based on texts by the Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck and premiered in 2017.Another stage work, based on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” was planned for 2025 but was unfinished.A performance of Mr. Reimann’s ninth and final opera, “L’Invisible,” at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2017. Five of his works were performed at the theater.Lieberenz/Ullstein Bild, via 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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    New York Philharmonic’s 2024-25 Season: What We Want to Hear

    Gustavo Dudamel, who takes over as music and artistic director in 2026, is getting a head start with three weeks of concerts and more programs.Next season, the New York Philharmonic will be without a full-time maestro or a designate music director for the first time in decades.But Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar conductor who takes over as the ensemble’s music and artistic director in 2026, will help fill the gap, leading three weeks of concerts, the Philharmonic announced on Tuesday.Dudamel, who currently leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is steadily ramping up his commitments in New York. He is already helping to shape programming and tours. And next season he might begin to take part in auditions, though talks are still underway, said Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s president and chief executive. Dudamel will also lead the summer concert series in city parks.“This is how we’re going to introduce Gustavo to literally tens of thousands of New Yorkers across the boroughs,” Ginstling said. “When you look at the totality of that, it feels like we’re making huge strides toward his imminent arrival.”Ginstling described the coming 2024-25 season as one of “experimenting and exploring.” There will be five world premieres, including works by Nico Muhly, Jessie Montgomery and Kate Soper. The pianist Yuja Wang will serve as artist in residence, and the dancer Tiler Peck will organize a series of evening programs. The Philharmonic’s musicians will create a program focused on the orchestra’s legacy.Here are five highlights of the coming season, chosen by critics and editors for The New York Times. JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZWe 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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    Ramy Youssef on His New Special, ‘More Feelings,’ and the Push to Represent

    In the week after he appeared as a presenter at the Oscars, the comic Ramy Youssef, a creator and director of the Hulu series “Ramy” and Emma Stone’s co-star in “Poor Things,” was taking meetings in Hollywood on what’s known as a water-bottle tour — “except without the water bottle,” he said. He is fasting for Ramadan.Youssef, who will turn 33 this month, has been a rapidly rising star since the 2019 debut of “Ramy,” a semi-autobiographical award-winning show in which he plays the son of Egyptian immigrants in suburban New Jersey — as he is in real life — struggling to define himself amid the sometimes conflicting pull of Muslim faith and young adult, Tinder-era life. When Youssef won a Golden Globe for best actor in a comedy in 2020, he accepted the trophy by saying, “Allahu akbar. This is thanks to God — and Hulu.”Now his ascent is even sharper. He is following his surprising turn in the Oscar-winning “Poor Things” — as a thoughtful scientist and cast-aside love — with a standup special, his second for HBO. The program, “More Feelings,” due Saturday, mines personal territory, religious and cultural stereotypes, and his budding friendship with Taylor Swift (a pal of Stone’s), who went to see his set. He will also host “Saturday Night Live” on March 30.Those are only a few of the many projects he has going, he said in a video interview from Los Angeles, before he taped “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” He and his buddies “always joke that we make TV like immigrants,” he said. “We’re always working. We’re not going to outsource too much. We’re just figuring out how to do what we can, small budgets. So that’s my expectation for my career. I’ll just, you know, figure that out.”Youssef’s HBO special, “More Feelings,” will premiere on Saturday; the following week, he’ll host “Saturday Night Live.”HBOBut he is also mulling the advice he got from Yorgos Lanthimos, the “Poor Things” director, to get out of TV and start making movies. Then again, an invitation to direct an episode of “The Bear” led Youssef to Copenhagen and a daylong stint staging at the fabled restaurant Noma. “It’s such a hard table to get,” he said. “I felt bad for whoever had waited a year to eat there and then I made their plate.” (The episode garnered him a nomination for a Directors Guild of America Award.) A fourth season of “Ramy,” delayed by the Hollywood strikes, will happen, he promised. “The question is, when?”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 Did Wagner Want His ‘Ring’ Cycle to Sound?

    With a team of researchers and dedicated musicians, the conductor Kent Nagano is taking a historically informed performance approach to Wagner’s epic.What began as a flippantly offered pipe dream, on second thought sounded too good to resist.Kent Nagano was leading the period-instrument ensemble Concerto Köln in concert performances of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” in 2016 when one musician suggested he come back for more, and with new repertoire. Because Nagano was conducting the “Ring” at the time, he lightheartedly said, “How about Wagner?”They laughed at the idea of taking on Wagner’s four-opera, 15-hour epic, Nagano recalled in a recent interview. Not just playing it, but devoting years of research and practice to a historically informed performance of it. Then they realized that this was rich terrain; installments of the “Ring” had been given this treatment before, but they didn’t know of any complete cycle. Now, after years of study and partnerships across universities, orchestras and cities in Germany, Nagano and his collaborators are in the middle of presenting their findings.Nagano’s work on this “Ring” has included creating Wagner-Lesarten, or Wagner Readings, a research organization devoted to the project.Simon van Boxtel PhotographyAnd just in time: In 2026, it will be 150 years since Wagner premiered the full “Ring” at his festival in Bayreuth, Germany. Each year until then, Nagano and the Concerto Köln — with the addition of Dresdner Festspielorchester for “Die Walküre” — are touring installments of their historically informed “Ring” operas: last year, “Das Rheingold,” and now “Die Walküre.”Heard in the acoustically generous Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on March 16 as part of the NTR ZaterdagMatinee series, “Die Walküre” took on such clarity that no supertitles were necessary to understand the singers. And, yes, the score sounded different from a typical modern performance.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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    ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’: Still Hard to Forget

    Michel Gondry’s surreal love story stunned audiences in 2004, and some of its sentiments are all the more relevant in the social media age.They say the only cure for heartbreak is time, although a lobotomy might be more effective. It’s a thorny conceit that Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) tested out for our pleasure in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” by erasing memories of her ex-boyfriend, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey). Michel Gondry’s surreal love story stunned audiences in 2004 and remains hard to forget 20 years later.Like all painful breakups, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” has lingered in the consciousness long after the love story’s expiration date. The screenwriter Charlie Kaufman — who was fresh off the critical double-hitters “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” — wrote Clementine and Joel’s love affair as a claustrophobic, unspooling maze that earned the movie an Oscar for best screenplay. Kirsten Dunst and Mark Ruffalo were knocking on stardom’s door when they gave delightful supporting performances as haphazard assistants of the memory-erasing company Lacuna Inc. The movie was one of a handful of romantic comedies from its decade (including “Lost in Translation” and “(500) Days of Summer”) that redefined what it meant to be both misunderstood and in love; in this cinematic landscape, love interests didn’t end up happily ever after. What they gave instead was the idea that maybe a love lost isn’t necessarily a net loss.As Clementine, an erratic and compulsive bookstore clerk, Winslet gives a career-redefining performance. Today, her idiosyncratic character lives on TikTok and Tumblr as a patron saint of women who are paradoxically lovable and terrifying. (“I apply my personality as a paste,” she says of her hair dye, aptly titled Blue Ruin.) Her legacy stands in the pantheon of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, a fast-talking screwball woman who protests, “Too many guys see me as a concept.” Most of all, she loves her own despair — if the film had come out today, it would be easy to imagine her posting about Prozac, stomach aches and Ottessa Moshfegh novels.And as Joel, Carrey remains an avatar for frustratingly plain and tightly wound men. After Joel discovers that Clementine has zapped him and their relationship thanks to Lacuna Inc., he decides to do the same. (In a contemporary parallel, I have blocked someone on Instagram to regain a sense of control, only to discover the psychic torture persists.) Together, they tumble through Joel’s tangled and chimeric subconscious in quotidian montages of early bliss and innocent flirtations.Along the way, Joel realizes he’d rather have all of Clementine, heartbreak included, than none of her. He desperately tries to salvage the memories as they’re deleted, trapping himself in a maze of his own psyche. The film spins out of control, traversing realities and timelines, until we are left with a teary-eyed Clementine and Joel, who acknowledge the futility of their relationship. “I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me,” asserts Clementine. “OK,” Joel says with a smirk and then agrees to try again, despite knowing the inevitable disaster of their attraction.A. O. Scott looks back at Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s film about loss, memory and love.Ellen Kuras/Focus FeaturesWe 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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    Lil Nas X Runs New York Half Marathon in Coach Sneakers

    The rapper and singer, clad in bulky designer sneakers and the official race T-shirt, was a last-minute addition at the NYC Half.Ahead of one of its signature events, New York Road Runners fielded an unusual email request on Friday night.The rapper and singer Lil Nas X, who was visiting New York from Los Angeles, had seen some advertisements for the United Airlines NYC Half, a 13.1-mile race that was set to be staged on Sunday morning. And one of his representatives was curious: Did the race have room for one more runner?“It kind of came out of the blue,” Rob Simmelkjaer, the chief executive of New York Road Runners, said in a telephone interview on Monday.The nonprofit, which puts on about 60 races each year, including the New York City Marathon, was happy to oblige. It hardly mattered that Lil Nas X, who will turn 25 next month, had seldom run more than three miles consecutively, let alone a half-marathon. Or that he showed up for the race in a pair of Coach high-top sneakers, which are more boot than high-end racing flat.Accompanied by Roberto Mandje, New York Road Runners’ senior adviser for running engagement and coaching, Lil Nas X was among more than 27,000 finishers, completing the race in 2 hours 32 minutes 53 seconds.“We would be running and you’d hear someone shout, ‘Wait, was that Lil Nas X?’” Mr. Mandje said in an interview. “So he’d turn around and wave, and they’d freak out.”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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    David Seidler, Oscar-Winning Writer of ‘The King’s Speech,’ Dies at 86

    He drew on his own painful experiences with a stutter in depicting King George VI’s struggles to overcome his impediment and rally Britain in World War II.David Seidler, a screenwriter whose Oscar-winning script for “The King’s Speech” — about King George VI conquering a stutter to rally Britain at the outset of World War II — drew on his own painful experience with a childhood stammer, died on Saturday on a fly-fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86 and lived in Santa Fe, N.M.His manager, Jeff Aghassi, disclosed the death in a statement but did not cite a cause. “David was in the place he loved most in the world — New Zealand — doing what gave him the greatest peace, which was fly-fishing,” Mr. Aghassi said. “If given the chance, it is exactly as he would have scripted it.”On winning the Academy Award for best original screenplay for “The King’s Speech” (2010), Mr. Seidler said from the Hollywood stage that he was accepting on behalf of all stutterers. “We have a voice; we have been heard,’’ he said.The movie, a historical drama in the form of a buddy picture about an afflicted future monarch (Colin Firth) and his talented but unlicensed speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), was a commercial and critical success. It also won Oscars for best picture, best director (Tom Hooper) and best actor (Mr. Firth).Colin Firth in the 2010 film “The King’s Speech.” Mr. Seidler’s script centered on George VI’s struggle to overcome his stutter as he prepared to speak to his beleaguered nation during wartime.Laurie Sparham/The Weinstein CompanyMr. Seidler, who was born in England but emigrated with his family to the United States as a child during World War II, spent much of his career writing little-noticed television projects, including soap operas, a biopic of the Partridge Family singers and the TV movie “Onassis: The Richest Man in the World” (1988), written with a longtime co-writer, Jacqueline Feather. That same year, he broke onto the big screen as a co-writer (with Arnold Schulman) of “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” about the automobile inventor Preston Tucker, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.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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    Toby Keith Will Be Inducted Into the Country Hall of Fame This Year

    The organization behind the honors avoids electing artists in the year of their death, but the singer died in February just after this year’s vote closed.The country music star Toby Keith, who died last month after battling stomach cancer, has been selected for the Country Music Hall of Fame despite a rule against electing artists in the year of their death, the Country Music Association said on Monday.The induction is moving forward on a technicality: The vote closed on Feb. 2 — three days before the singer’s death on Feb. 5 at age 62.A few hours after officials at the association learned about the death of Keith, the artist behind No. 1 country hits like “Who’s Your Daddy?” and “Made in America,” they received the results of the vote, which included Keith as a chosen inductee.“My heart sank that Tuesday afternoon, knowing that we had missed the chance to inform Toby while he was still with us,” Sarah Trahern, the chief executive of the Country Music Association, said as the group announced the new inductees on Monday.It is not uncommon for inductees to be added to the hall of fame posthumously, but the association’s rule specifically disallows artists to be elected in the year of their death. “That doesn’t apply this year,” Trahern said.With a catalog that included both traditional honky-tonk and pop-country, Keith released 20 No. 1 Billboard country singles during his three-decade career. He was a political lightning rod at times, and many remember Keith, who wrote or co-wrote most of his material, for his post-9/11 song “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” which proclaimed that putting a “boot in your ass” is the “American way.”Chosen by an anonymous panel of voters, Keith will join more than 150 figures who have helped shape country music, a roster that includes Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley and Charley Pride. The other two additions to the hall of fame that were announced Monday are the musicians John Anderson and James Burton, who will be inducted along with Keith in October at the CMA Theater in Nashville. More