Aurelia Butler

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    Review: The Philadelphia Orchestra Revels, and Struggles, in Jazz

    At Carnegie Hall, a program of Stravinsky, Weill and freely improvised Gershwin highlighted a dialogue between jazz and classical music.Much of 20th-century classical music owes a deep thanks to jazz. And while on paper, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night was organized for a festival at the hall, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, the subtext was American jazz.All three of the composers on the program (Stravinsky, Weill and Gershwin) loved and, to one extent or another, made references to the style in their music. Although Stravinsky was based in Europe when he premiered “Petrushka” in 1911, he was already a U.S. citizen when he revised this piece in 1947, and had long experimented with incorporating jazz into some of his pieces — and jazz musicians loved him right back. Weill, who left Europe for the United States after the fall of the Weimar Republic, was also steeped in jazz. And Gershwin, of course, wouldn’t be Gershwin without it.The Philadelphians opened with a magical performance of “Petrushka,” led off by a piquant solo from Patrick Williams, the associate principal flutist. The orchestra staked out rhythmic details with crystalline precision and saw each phrase through with patience and a rich sound. Stravinsky relays the spirit of Petrushka, the folkloric Russian trickster puppet, and the ballet’s tale of a deeply twisted puppet love triangle, with equal parts humor and darkness; the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the musicians captured the piece’s flickers of light and its swirls of despair.Weill’s Symphony No. 2, from 1934, is an oddity: structurally and harmonically a mash-up of plush, Mahlerian harmonies, Weill’s acidic stage works, and jazz-inflected plain-spokenness. In its best moments, such as in the dreamy, lonely slow movement — with a trombone solo played gracefully by Nitzan Haroz — this music feels like being inside an Edward Hopper painting.The giddiest part of the evening was a literally jazzed-up version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” featuring the jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and the members of his trio: the bassist Martin Jaffe and the drummer Jason Marsalis.Roberts has made a specialty of reworking Gershwin; along with the “Rhapsody,” which he recorded nearly three decades ago, he has toured his version of the Concerto in F. In Tuesday’s account of the “Rhapsody,” the orchestra played its traditional score, but Roberts used the piano solos to introduce extended improvisations for himself, sometimes in flights of Romantic, Rachmaninoff-esque fancy, and occasionally nodding instead to the blues and stride piano. By the jazz standards of 2024, Roberts is conservative, and while he didn’t cast any new light on a cherished standard, his performance was still charming.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?  More

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    ‘Barbie’ Is Adapted? Let’s Fix the Oscar Screenplay Categories.

    In the midst of the squabbles about actors and directors, there’s always at least one screenplay to debate when Oscar nominations are announced. Last year, in fact, there were two, and I regularly get collared by people wondering: What in the world were “Glass Onion” and “Top Gun: Maverick” doing in the best adapted screenplay bucket? Adapted from what? Was there some secret book about fighter pilots or tech mogul whodunits they’d missed?Nope. There’s also no previous story about a Barbie who starts thinking about death and sets out on an existential journey. But that didn’t keep the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the industry organization that gives out the Oscars, from kicking “Barbie” into the adapted category.Judd Apatow declared the reclassification of “Barbie,” the biggest movie of 2023 any way you slice it, “insulting” to its writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Moving “Barbie” from the best original screenplay category — where it was the probable winner over films like “The Holdovers” and “Past Lives” — to adapted changed its Oscar chances. Now, alongside a slate that includes the juggernaut “Oppenheimer,” it’s a horse race. I don’t know what’s going to win.The academy posts some of its Oscar rules publicly, but not the ones that distinguish original screenplays from adapted ones. The Writers Guild of America, the union to which Hollywood’s scripters belong, does. And for the most part, judging from Oscar history, they’re in sync. Sequels, remakes and screenplays based on underlying material (including nonfiction, like a biography, that contains a narrative) are considered “nonoriginal,” and in awards contexts are usually classed as adaptations. Original screenplays either are not based on material (generally as stipulated in the writer’s contract), or they’re based on a nonfiction book that doesn’t have a narrative, like a study of sailing ships in the 19th century.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?  More

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    Pitchfork, the Early Years

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicLast week, Condé Nast announced that Pitchfork, the taste-making music news and criticism website it had acquired in 2015 — which had entranced and sometimes infuriated fans for more than two decades — would be brought under the editorial umbrella of GQ. Many staffers were laid off.The announcement felt like a death knell for a certain kind of critical posture — progressive but not inaccessible, knowledgeable but also curious — that feels increasingly remote in the current media landscape. Some version of the site will continue, but online, the news was received with dismay and frustration.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation with two of the people responsible for building the site’s editorial and business operations about what it took to develop the company from a one-person organization to a cross-platform publication and festival business, and the challenges that led to its sale to Condé Nast.Guests:Ryan Schreiber, the founder of Pitchfork and its editor in chief for approximately two decadesChris Kaskie, Pitchfork’s first employee and first CEOConnect 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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    Female Rappers in the Spotlight Make Room for Motherhood

    As their influence and success continue to grow, artists including Sexyy Red and Cardi B are destigmatizing motherhood for hip-hop performers.When the rapper Sexyy Red realized she was pregnant with her second child this summer, just after her singles “Pound Town” and “SkeeYee” broke through on the charts and dominated TikTok, her excitement was met with hesitancy by some members of her team.She said some people in her camp were supportive. Others advised her to have an abortion, counsel she rejected. “I’m not never going to let nobody tell me what to do with my body,” she said during a video call in December.Sexyy, born Janae Wherry, publicly announced her pregnancy via an Instagram post on the heels of the release of “Rich Baby Daddy,” a hit collaboration with Drake and SZA. Now in her final trimester, she often performs in belly-hugging unitards as she twerks and raps her hits, taking her 3-year-old son, Chuckyy, on the road with help from her mother.Women in music, and particularly in the male-dominated battle zone of hip-hop, have long been advised to terminate pregnancies, or at least to recede from the spotlight until their babies were delivered, told that showcasing pregnancy and motherhood would make them seem weak, unappealing or unfocused on their highly competitive careers. Male-led rap crews and record labels have traditionally put their might behind one female M.C. at a time, creating pressure for women to not cede their moment for anything, including starting a family.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?  More

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    Country Singer Chris Young Is Arrested at a Nashville Bar

    The musician was released on bond for charges of disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest.Chris Young, the country music singer, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest after an altercation at a bar in Nashville on Monday night, the authorities said.While Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents were looking at IDs in a downtown Nashville bar, Mr. Young, 38, struck one of the agents, according to an arrest affidavit filed with a criminal court in Nashville. Agents handcuffed Mr. Young after he did not comply with their orders, it said.Mr. Young had his breakthrough when he won the country-music reality TV competition “Nashville Star” in 2006. His second album, “The Man I Want to Be,” released in 2009, hit platinum in the United States. He has since been a fixture on the Billboard country charts.A representative for Mr. Young declined to comment.The Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents arrived at a bar called Tin Roof at about 8:30 p.m. to check the IDs of the patrons, including Mr. Young, the arrest affidavit said. After the check, Mr. Young began asking the agents questions, which they said they answered, and he began video recording them.The agents left and continued onto a bar next door, called DawgHouse Saloon. The arrest affidavit said that Mr. Young and his friends had followed them and began talking to the people there. When the agents finished their compliance checks, Mr. Young tried to block one of the agents from leaving and hit him on the shoulder, it said.The agent who was struck, Joseph Phillips, pushed Mr. Young to create distance, then other patrons got up to intervene, the affidavit said. Another agent tried speaking to Mr. Young, who did not comply with the orders. Then the agents detained him.The affidavit described Mr. Young as having had “slurred speech” and his eyes as “blood shot and watery.” It also said the people who were with Mr. Young were “making the incident hostile.”Mr. Young was later taken into custody and released on bonds of $250 for the disorderly conduct charge, $1,000 for the resisting arrest charge and $1,250 for the assault charge, according to reports by Nashville’s criminal court clerk. He is expected to appear in court on Feb. 16.Aimee Ortiz More

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    Why Greta Gerwig Was Snubbed for a Best Director Nomination

    “Barbie” scored a best-picture nomination and scooped up eight nods overall. Several factors could have led to Gerwig’s omission.In her own world, Barbie can accomplish just about anything. But in the real world, “Barbie” was dealt a significant setback Tuesday morning: Though Greta Gerwig’s colorful comedy skewering the patriarchy was the biggest blockbuster of last year and set a record for the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a woman, Gerwig failed to receive an Oscar nomination for best director.The snub had many in Hollywood scratching their heads, since the 40-year-old filmmaker had earned best director nominations from the Golden Globes and Directors Guild of America for “Barbie” and had picked up an Oscar nod for her solo debut, “Lady Bird,” just six years ago.Ryan Gosling, Ken to Margot Robbie’s Barbie, criticized the academy’s vote even as he himself received an Oscar nomination. “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius,” he said in a statement, referring to both Gerwig and Robbie, who missed out on a best actress nod. “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”Does the matter come down to simple sexism? Certainly, if it were not for the presence of Justine Triet, the “Anatomy of a Fall” filmmaker, among the directing nominees, the academy would have a lot more explaining to do. Oscar voters have long been accused of ascribing more importance to male-led stories, a bias the academy has tried to rectify in recent years by diversifying its ranks. Still, comedies often struggle to win favor with the Oscars, and a female-led comedy has even more hurdles to overcome, as Robbie found.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?  More

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    Frank Farian, the Man Behind Milli Vanilli, Is Dead at 82

    He had worldwide success with the disco group Boney M. He was better known for a duo that had hit records but, it turned out, only pretended to sing.Frank Farian, the hit-making German record producer who masterminded the model-handsome dance-pop duo Milli Vanilli and propelled them to Grammy-winning heights — until it was revealed that they were little more than lip-syncing marionettes — died on Tuesday at his home in Miami. He was 82.His death was announced by Philip Kallrath of Allendorf Media, a spokesman for Mr. Farian’s family.Mr. Farian was no stranger to the pop charts in the late 1980s, when he brought together Rob Pilatus, the son of an American serviceman and a German dancer, and Fab Morvan, a French singer and dancer, to create one of pop music’s most sugary bonbons.He was born Franz Reuther on July 18, 1941, in Kirn, Germany. His father, a furrier turned soldier, was killed during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, leaving Franz and his older siblings, Hertha and Heinz, to be raised by their mother, a schoolteacher.Coming of age on a steady diet of American rock ’n’ roll records, Mr. Farian eventually became a performer himself. He rose to the top of the West German charts in 1976 with “Rocky,” a bouncy, German-language interpretation of a hit by the American country artist Dickey Lee.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?  More

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    2024 Oscar Nominations: ‘Oppenheimer’ Leads the Way With 13 Nominations

    The nominees for the 96th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning and last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon proved to be a dominant duo once again, with “Oppenheimer” leading the way with 13 nominations and “Barbie” collecting eight. A handful of major awards contenders are still exclusively in theaters, most notably “American Fiction,” “Poor Things” and “The Zone of Interest,” which are all best picture nominees. But the vast majority of titles are currently available to stream or rent on various platforms. Here’s a complete rundown of where to find all the major awards hopefuls.The writer and director Christopher Nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressNominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, makeup and hairstyling, sound, original score.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Conjuring the dark wizardry of the Manhattan Project, the director Christopher Nolan turned the Trinity test into a seat-rumbling summer spectacle, placing it at the center of “Oppenheimer” like the nuclear core of 20th-century history. But there’s a disturbing intimacy to the film as well, with Cillian Murphy’s tremulous J. Robert Oppenheimer leading an unstable band of scientists while nearly drowning in uncharted political and ethical waters. In exploring the origins of a technological boogeyman that continues to haunt mankind, Nolan embraces the contradictions of the flawed, brilliant man whose spirit seems to embody it.‘Barbie’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best picture, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, original song (two nominees).How to watch: Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Perhaps “Barbie” was destined to become the year’s biggest box-office phenomenon, but Greta Gerwig had to thread a very thin needle in creating a pop entertainment of buoyancy and substance. While playing off the fizzy appeal of the fashionable plastic doll that has lined toy shelves for over half a century, Gerwig seizes the opportunity to reflect on the distance between Barbie’s vision of womanhood and the troubling messiness of reality. As Gerwig’s bruised idealist, Margot Robbie’s Barbie keeps the tone light as she journeys from the matriarchal paradise of Barbieland to the real world, which isn’t the utopia she might have imagined.‘Killers of the Flower Moon’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, supporting actor, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, original score, original song.How to watch: Stream it on Apple TV+. Buy it on Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.The nativist skirmishes and corruption that have defined so many of Martin Scorsese’s gangster (and non-gangster) dramas surface again in this sprawling epic of American greed and violence, based on David Grann’s historical nonfiction book. Set in the oil-rich Osage territory of 1920s Oklahoma, “Killers of the Flower Moon” looks into a murderous conspiracy to wrest claim rights away from the native population. At the film’s center is the toxic love story between an Osage woman (Lily Gladstone) and an impressionable war veteran (Leonardo DiCaprio) whose affection for her is clouded by his relationship to his scheming uncle (Robert De Niro) and a taste for the finer things.‘The Holdovers’Alexander Payne narrates a sequence from his film featuring Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa.Seacia Pavao/Focus FeaturesNominated for: Best picture, actor, supporting actress, original screenplay, editing.How to watch: Stream it on Peacock. Buy it on Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu and Amazon.Reuniting for the first time since “Sideways” nearly 20 years ago, the director Alexander Payne and his lovably cantankerous star, Paul Giamatti, have made a film (destined to become a future holiday staple) about the relationship between three people left to themselves over Christmas in 1970. Giamatti stars as the least-liked teacher at an elite New England boarding school, assigned to babysit the small handful of students whose parents didn’t pick them up for the break. After a good deal of friction, he starts to forge a warmer relationship with one troubled student (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who’s facing her first Christmas since losing her son in Vietnam.‘Maestro’The director Bradley Cooper narrates a sequence from the film in which he stars alongside Carey Mulligan.Jason McDonald/NetflixNominated for: Best picture, actor, actress, original screenplay, cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, sound.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.In his follow-up to “A Star Is Born,” the director/actor Bradley Cooper again turns to the emotionally turbulent life of a musician, casting himself as Leonard Bernstein, the famed American conductor and composer who lived a double life in full. Starting in lustrous black-and-white, “Maestro” depicts the young Bernstein’s intoxicating rise through the New York Philharmonic and his romance with the stage actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) in the 1940s. The film then shifts to color in later decades, as Bernstein’s sexual dalliances and substance abuse take their toll on a marriage that’s under sharp public scrutiny.‘Anatomy of a Fall’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, original screenplay, editing.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.The winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s penetrating drama sounds like a routine did-she-or-didn’t-she courtroom procedural, as a novelist (Sandra Hüller) stands trial for murdering her husband at their Alpine chalet. Yet the courtroom theatrics open up a deeper investigation into a difficult marriage and the toll it exacts on the couple’s legally blind son (Milo Machado Graner), who discovers the body. Though the woman’s innocence is at stake, Triet is more compelled by the domestic tensions leading up to the death and the fallout from the trial.‘Past Lives’The writer and director Celine Song narrates a sequence from her film, featuring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo.Jon Pack/A24Nominated for: Best picture, original screenplay.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.In her heart-rending feature debut as a writer-director, the playwright Celine Song offers a what-if romantic scenario that pulls at the identity of a happily married woman in New York, even decades after she and her family moved from South Korea. Once extremely close childhood friends, Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) reconnect as adults on social media, and meet again in America, where they reminisce and inevitably begin to wonder about the path not taken. Comparisons to Richard Linklater’s “Sunrise” trilogy may be inevitable, but the temptation and longing in “Past Lives” is uniquely complicated by the cultural crosswinds that affect Nora, Hae Sung and Nora’s American husband (John Magaro), who waits patiently in the wings.‘Nyad’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best actress, supporting actress.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.After directing a series of documentaries about seemingly impossible physical feats, like scaling the 3,000-foot El Capitan rock wall without ropes (“Free Solo”) or pulling off the Thailand cave rescue (“The Rescue”), Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin make a natural transition to features with this biopic about the distance swimmer Diana Nyad. Nyad (Annette Bening) had set several distance records in the 1970s, but the film focuses on her effort to swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64, with help from her close friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster). Vasarhelyi and Chin once again tap into the indomitable spirit of an athlete willing to court death to push the limits.‘May December’The director Todd Haynes narrates a sequence from his film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.Francois Duhamel/NetflixNominated for: Original screenplay.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.With their prismatic take on a tabloid scandal that echoes the Mary Kay Letourneau case, the director Todd Haynes and the screenwriter, Samy Burch, adopt a serio-comic tone that echoes high art like “Persona” one minute and early 2000s USA Network fodder the next. Natalie Portman stars as a semifamous actress who travels to Savannah, Ga., to study for the role of a Letourneau-like woman (Julianne Moore) who was caught having sex with a seventh-grade boy, but wound up marrying him and having children after a prison stint. The actress’s presence, asking simple questions that the couple has been studiously avoiding, destabilizes their relationship, particularly the much-younger husband (Charles Melton), who starts to reflect on what happened to him.‘Rustin’[embedded content]Nominated for: Best actor.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.In championing a less-heralded yet fascinatingly multidimensional figure in the civil rights movement, “Rustin” gains much of its power from Colman Domingo’s electrifying lead performance as Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and socialist who had the ear of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The action leads up to Rustin’s greatest triumph as an organizer, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of an estimated 250,000 people. But “Rustin” digs into the intense internal divisions within the movement over holding the march as a message to the Democratic front-runner John F. Kennedy. It also explores the depth of Rustin’s personal passion for economic justice.Other Major Nominees‘Society of the Snow’Nominated for: Best international feature. Makeup and hairstyling.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.‘Elemental’Nominated for: Best animated feature.How to watch: Stream it on Disney+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘Nimona’Nominated for: Best animated feature.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’Nominated for: Best animated feature.How to watch: Stream it on Netflix. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President’Nominated for: Best documentary feature.How to watch: Stream it on Disney+.‘The Eternal Memory’Nominated for: Best documentary feature.How to watch: Stream it on Paramount+. Buy it on Google Play, Vudu, YouTube and Apple TV.‘Four Daughters’Nominated for: Best documentary feature.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.‘20 Days in Mariupol’Nominated for: Best documentary feature.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. More