Aurelia Butler

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    Philadelphia Orchestra’s Home to Be Renamed Marian Anderson Hall

    Because of a $25 million gift, the venue, Verizon Hall, will be renamed to honor Anderson, a pioneering Black opera singer.Marian Anderson, the renowned contralto and civil rights figure who broke racial barriers in the arts and helped pave the way for other Black artists, is being honored in her hometown, Philadelphia.The Philadelphia Orchestra’s home will be renamed Marian Anderson Hall in recognition of a $25 million gift in her honor, the ensemble announced on Wednesday.Anderson, who was born in Philadelphia in 1897 and died in 1993, became the first Black singer to perform a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera in 1955, at a time when Black artists in the United States faced rampant racial discrimination.Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center, which oversees what is now known as Verizon Hall, said in an interview that Anderson was an “extraordinary artist who used her artistry fearlessly in the fight for civil rights.”“We hope to inspire everyone who comes through our doors with this idea that the arts are a transformative force for good in the world,” he said. “We also want to show through this gesture that everyone is welcome.”The naming rights for the hall expired in January. (Verizon contributed $14.5 million through its foundation to the construction of the Kimmel Center, which opened in 2001.)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 ‘Imaginary’ and ‘Lisa Frankenstein,’ Defending PG-13 Horror

    Not everyone needs a scary movie that goes to the darkest extremes. Here’s why milder horror films can still pack a punch.It’s nothing new to say that the scariest beasts are those left to the imagination: In the darkened corners of a room, on the ocean floor, in the vacuum of space — terror tends to lurk in the periphery, where it taunts us with what we don’t (or worse, can’t) know. There’s one unfairly maligned horror-movie feature that, when used wisely, can aid with such artful restraint: the humble PG-13 rating.Since many horror nerds predicate their identity on being able to enjoy content that is too depraved for the general public, they tend to look down on the PG-13 scary movie, viewing it as watered-down or wimpy. These fans can tend to turn genre viewing into a sort of contest in which the one who can stomach (or even delight in) the most deviant content wins: You can’t call yourself a real horror fan unless you’ve seen “Salò”/“Cannibal Holocaust”/all three sequences of “The Human Centipede.”Yes, it may be that one of the most powerful things the genre can do is subvert social norms, and it’s difficult to push boundaries when you’re pitching to a broader or younger audience. But it’s not impossible. Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell,” for instance, about a cursed loan officer, contains Raimi’s over-the-top camp sensibility, yet reels in some of his signature gore. It opts for softer gross-outs like bugs and vomit instead of heavy blood and guts, but it doesn’t sacrifice impact. I once saw a screening of it at MoMA that played like a metal show, with the film’s sound blasting from the speakers and squeals of delight jumping from the audience with each increasingly demented sequence.A scene with Pyper Braun from “Imaginary,” a new Blumhouse PG-13 film.Parrish Lewis/LionsgateThe genre is a great tool for more than just provocation, though. The latest PG-13 horror from Blumhouse, “Imaginary” (in theaters March 8), experiments with just how little you can show while still provoking fear with the first teaser for the film, which prompts audience members to close their eyes and imagine visuals to accompany audio cues. The full film plays with the perception of things that are seen but not heard, or heard but not seen — a figure just at the corner of a frame, a child responding to the directions of a sinister imaginary friend that only she can see.Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring” (2002), about a haunted videotape, is regarded as one of the best PG-13 horror films, and its most explicit image comes in the first 20 minutes. The rest of the movie relies on atmosphere to create tension, and does so stunningly; the soft static hum of an analog television, a fly plucked gently by its wings to bring it from inside a screen to outside of it. Even the film’s signature ghost is defined by what’s hidden: her long, dark hair pulled forward to shield her face.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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    Amaro Freitas Takes His Jazz Somewhere New: The Amazon

    For his latest album, “Y’Y,” the Brazilian composer looked to inspirations in nature and experiments with prepared pianos.In the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco — a narrow, humid stretch of land where the South American coastline juts out into the Atlantic — fables endure the test of time. “There’s one about the Pajeú, the river which runs through the state,” the jazz composer and pianist Amaro Freitas said on a recent morning, video-calling from his sun-drenched living room in Recife. “It goes like this: Once upon a time, a Brazilian viola was buried in the riverbed. From that moment on, anyone who drank from the stream would become a poet.”Freitas, 32, who was born in Pernambuco and grew up surrounded by stories like this, never became a poet (though he is now married to one). But his work — which weaves traditional Northeastern musical styles such as baião and frevo into the language of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk — has always drawn from the cultural traditions and history of his homeland. Part of a new generation of Brazilian jazz artists looking to democratize and inject fresh life into the genre, Freitas and his trio first garnered critical acclaim with albums including “Sangue Negro” (2016), “Rasif” (2018) and “Sankofa,” a 2021 work he has described as a spiritual journey into the forgotten narratives of Black Brazil.His new solo record, “Y’Y,” out Friday, sees him travel out of Pernambuco and into the Amazon, where the sounds of birds, water and rustling leaves lend themselves to polyrhythmic compositions reminiscent of the rainforest. Drawing from Freitas’s encounters with the Sateré-Mawé Indigenous community, these new songs pay homage to the natural world.“National media here don’t cover the Amazon in depth,” said Freitas, speaking in Portuguese, wearing a graphic T-shirt printed with Nelson Mandela’s face. “So when I went there, and I saw the floating houses, saw the hammocks on boats, visited a tribe for the first time, and looked at the place where the straw-colored waters of the Amazon River meet the black Rio Negro, I felt like I was accessing another Brazil.”It was around the same time that Freitas became more interested in playing prepared, or modified, pianos. The technique — popularized by the 20th-century American composer and musical theorist John Cage — refers to placing items like bolts or screws between the instrument’s strings to create unique, unconventional and often more rhythmic sounds. “The difference is, unlike Cage, I didn’t want to use any metal — that damages the instrument, which would make touring really difficult. People would be like, ‘You’re putting a nail in my piano?’” Freitas said, laughing. “So I use wood, among other things: Amazonian seeds, clothes hangers, dominoes.”“There are times where I’m splitting myself between the Amazonian seeds, the African rhythms, and, on the other hand, European melodies,” Freitas, center, said. “It’s as though my left hand is Africa and my right hand is Europe.”Carlos BarneyWe 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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    ‘As We Speak’: Rap Music on Trial’ Review: Weaponizing Lyrics in Court

    Lyrics that contain references to violence have been used as legal evidence, a practice this documentary by J.M. Harper condemns as unfair and prejudicial.Imagine music that you wrote being held against you in a criminal proceeding. In the documentary “As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial,” the Bronx-born rapper Kemba travels around the country and to Britain, interviewing artists and legal experts about how that has been more than a theoretical possibility for rappers.Mac Phipps, for instance, was convicted of manslaughter and spent more than two decades in prison, even though another man had confessed to the crime. (He was released in 2021.) In an interview with Kemba, he describes how references to violence in his lyrics were used at his trial, despite what he suggests was inadequate context. (One line cited concerned his father, a Vietnam veteran.)Elsewhere in this documentary, directed by J.M. Harper, the academic Adam Dunbar explains a set of studies he conducted. Participants were asked to judge lyrics from the same song: Some were told they were rap lyrics, others were told they were country and still others were told they were heavy metal. The group that believed the words were rap lyrics labeled the songwriter as having a greater criminal propensity. When the artist manager Chace Infinite argues that rap is taken more literally than other music, the movie cuts to clips of Johnny Cash and Freddie Mercury. Would a jury have accorded legal weight to Cash’s claim, in song, to have “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”?Kemba situates the association of rap with crime in a historical context of censorship of Black music. In another thread, “As We Speak” imagines Kemba himself on trial, with his writing being used against him in a criminal court. The staged material is a bit heavy-handed, but “As We Speak” makes a powerful case for the necessity of being free to make art, and for public awareness that art rarely qualifies as legal evidence.As We Speak: Rap Music on TrialNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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    Criticism of Israel at Berlin Film Festival Stirs Antisemitism Debate

    The backlash to some winners’ speeches at the festival shows how polarized and fraught Germany’s culture scene has become.When Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra walked onstage at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday night, they had come to talk about more than movies.Abraham and Adra, an Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking team, had just won the festival’s award for best documentary for “No Other Land,” a movie about Palestinian resistance to Israeli campaigns in the occupied territories. It was “very hard,” Adra said, to celebrate the award “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza.”He called upon German lawmakers to “stop sending weapons to Israel,” before Abraham called for a cease-fire and an end to Israel’s occupation.The audience, which included the culture minister of Germany, Claudia Roth, applauded loudly, and there were whistles and cheers in the hall.In the days since, Abraham and Adra’s speeches have become the latest flashpoint in a long-running debate in Germany around whether public statements by filmmakers, musicians and other artists should be described as antisemitic if they don’t line up with Germany’s official stance on Israel.Scores of German journalists and politicians have denounced the speeches. On Sunday, Kai Wegner, the mayor of Berlin, said in posts on X that the filmmakers’ statements were filled with “intolerable relativization,” because they left out any mention of Hamas.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 and His Complexities

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe country music superstar Toby Keith, who died this month at 62, was best known for the songs he released in the wake of 9/11 — especially his big, brawny anthems about American power and soldiers.But while he is most remembered for those tracks, they comprised only a portion of his whole catalog, which also included tenderly lighthearted love songs and numbers about the hollowness of masculinity.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Keith’s various modes, and the ways in which they bolstered each other; how his most successful songs were used as cultural proxies for political arguments; and the ways that patriotism and jingoism have shaped country music over the past two decades.Guest:David Cantwell, longtime country music journalist, co-author of the No Fences Review newsletter and author of “The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Meet Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour Openers

    The 21-year-old pop star wears her influences on her sleeve and, in one particular case, books them for her live show.Olivia Rodrigo onstage in California on Friday night.OK McCausland for The New York TimesDear listeners,Last Friday night, the pop sensation and verbal vampire slayer Olivia Rodrigo kicked off her Guts World Tour, one of the most anticipated live shows of the year. My colleague Jon Caramanica caught opening night in Palm Desert, Calif., and named it a Critic’s Pick, writing that Rodrigo “brought the perfection and order of musical theater to the pop-punk and piano balladry that her songs toggle between.”An avowed student of female-driven ’90s alternative rock — when I saw her two years ago at Radio City Music Hall, she played a rousing cover of Veruca Salt’s “Seether” — Rodrigo wears her influences on her sleeve and, in one particular case, books them for her tour. Though the brash, big-voiced pop singer Chappell Roan kicked off the show in Palm Desert, for some dates Rodrigo will be joined by the legendary Gen-X rockers the Breeders. Any young pop supernova who picks the Deal sisters to open for her — and who convinces them that she’s a talent worth supporting — is all right by me.While not everyone who sees the Guts World Tour will be lucky enough to witness some lavender-clad grrrls experience “Cannonball” live for the first time, every opener Rodrigo selected is worth arriving early to catch. Today’s playlist, comprising her supporting acts, hopes to convince you of that.Roan, a rising star whose influences connect the dots between Katy Perry and “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” opens the show until April 2, when the Breeders take over for a four-night stint at Madison Square Garden. They’ll pass the baton to Remi Wolf, an eclectic and charismatically in-your-face singer-songwriter, who will handle the European dates, until the tour returns to North America in July and is supported by the whispery electro-pop upstart PinkPantheress. In mid-August, for the tour’s last splash — forgive me — the Breeders return for several dates in Los Angeles.In her music, Rodrigo centers her own personal experience of girlhood, and in some sense all four of these supporting artists offer different variations on that theme. Get ready for some towering choruses, gigantic personalities and refreshingly expansive takes on musical femininity.Got that long hair, long beard, turtleneck sweater,LindsayWe 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: Lise Davidsen Cements Her Stardom in Met Opera’s ‘Forza’

    Lise Davidsen, entering the Italian repertoire at the company, was part of a superb cast as Verdi’s opera returned for the first time since 2006.As dramatic music swirled late Monday evening, the woman trudged a few steps pushing a filthy shopping cart — so hunched and bedraggled that she seemed like an extra, sent onstage to set the scene before the star entered.Then she opened her mouth, and a note emerged so pure and clear, widening into a cry before narrowing back into a murmur, that it could only be the soprano Lise Davidsen, cementing her stardom in a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” at the Metropolitan Opera.In her still-young Met career, Davidsen has triumphed in works by Tchaikovsky, Wagner and especially Strauss. She has quickly become the rare singer you want to hear in everything. But Verdi and the Italian repertoire traditionally belong to voices more velvety and warm than hers, which has the coolly powerful authority of an ivory sword, particularly in flooding high notes.There were moments on Monday that wanted a soprano more fiery than ivory. Davidsen is statuesque, and her sound is too: grand and decorous. There were moments when the anguish of Leonora, the heroine of “Forza,” would have been more crushing if her lower notes had earthier fervor.But come on. Quibbles aside, there are vanishingly few artists in the world singing with such generosity, sensitivity and visceral impact.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