Aurelia Butler

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    Leonie Benesch Brings a Quiet Intensity to Her Role in ‘Late Shift’

    From TV series to art house films, Leonie Benesch brings a quiet intensity to the screen, including her latest movie.The German actress Leonie Benesch appears in every scene of Petra Volpe’s “Late Shift,” a tense drama about a night nurse in an understaffed hospital.The film, which screens at the inaugural edition of South by Southwest London on Tuesday in its British debut, follows Benesch’s character, Floria, over the course of a single night. She rushes from bedside to bedside, bringing patients painkillers or peppermint tea and calms their nerves by trying to get hold of a doctor — or just by singing to them.To prepare for the role, Benesch said she shadowed nurses in a hospital for a week, learning to handle medical equipment and internalizing the rhythm of care work.“I wanted to understand the choreography and how do they move. How do they interact with patients? What’s the code-switching between talking to one another and talking to patients?” Benesch, 34, said in an interview. “The challenge for me,” she added, “was that a health care professional watch this and go: She could be one of us.”The actress spoke in May from a hotel bar in Cardiff, Wales, in crisp British-accented English. She was in Wales filming the political thriller “Prisoner,” the sort of large-budget international television production that dots her résumé along with smaller art house films.Benesch, right, with Christian Friedel in the 2009 film “The White Ribbon.” She landed the part of Eva, her first major film role, when she was just 17.X FilmeWe 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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    South by Southwest London Has Its Own Musical Touch

    The festival, which has a long association with music, presents an opportunity for London acts to perform on a bigger stage.When South by Southwest first began in Austin, Texas, in 1987, the Shoreditch neighborhood in East London was still filled with empty warehouses. But it was beginning to attract a wave of artists who would help it eventually become synonymous with music and culture.Almost 40 years later, this area will be the site of South by Southwest London, the organization’s first foray into Europe. And for some of the London-born musicians who are performing, it’s a huge opportunity that also reflects the area’s reputation and artistic cachet.“It’s super exciting that it’s now finally arriving on home soil,” said Joel Bailey, an R&B and soul artist from Southwest London whose stage name is BAELY. He continued: “London’s got so many different hubs of, kind of like pockets of creative spaces and Shoreditch is definitely one of them. It’s thriving.”Jojo Orme, who performs as Heartworms, was born in London and said she briefly lived in Shoreditch. “They just have the fingers on the pulse there. It’s always beating,” she said, adding that “so many people love to travel to Shoreditch for a show because it’s always a good time.”Jojo Orme, who performs as Heartworms, said people flock to shows in vibrant Shoreditch, the festival’s home base. “They just have the fingers on the pulse there.”@kate.samsara.photographySouth by Southwest London, which begins on Monday and runs through June 7, will feature performances by more than 500 artists across about 30 venues as part of its music festival. It will also include a film and conference series, just like the flagship festival in Austin. An Asia-Pacific branch of the event started in Sydney in 2023.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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    It’s Still South by Southwest, but This Time It’s in London

    The music, tech and film festival, long known for being in Austin, Texas, expands to Europe for the first time.The artist known as Beeple set a record in 2021 when a work of his — a collage of 5,000 images that existed only as a digital file — sold for $69.3 million in a Christie’s auction.Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, is one of the artists participating in the inaugural edition of South by Southwest London, the music, film and tech festival. This time, he is presenting “The Tree of Knowledge,” a critique of the human addiction to smartphones.“People don’t fully recognize how much their phone is stressing them out,” and how much they’re “dialing up the noise,” Beeple said in a phone interview. “They could make the choice to dial down the noise, and just put their phone down, and exist in a much more calm state in which technology still exists.”The work is a refrigerator-size box containing a giant tree (recreated via projection mapping), with screens on all sides, and a large dial. When viewers turn the dial, the box is covered with live news, stock prices and data, illustrating the information overload faced by humanity.“The Tree of Knowledge” by Beeple (Mike Winklemann) is designed to address humans’ addiction to smart phones. It features four video screens arranged in rectangular pillars with imagery generated from a variety of real-time data.Tree of Knowledge/Beeple Studios The owner of the Tree of Knowledge can control the work further by pressing a “choose violence” button, which initiates a violent state for several minutes before destroying the tree. The tree regenerates when the violence ends.Beeple Studios“The Tree of Knowledge” encapsulates the spirit of South by Southwest London, which begins on Monday and runs through June 7. The event will feature a diverse group of speakers, including the ABBA singer-songwriter Bjorn Ulvaeus, the actor Idris Elba, the wellness and meditation expert Deepak Chopra, the primatologist Jane Goodall and the comedian Katherine Ryan. There will also be voices from the technology world, including Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind lab and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry; and Alex Kendall, the chief executive of Wayve, a developer of artificial intelligence systems for self-driving cars.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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    Iranian Film at South by Southwest London Offers a Dose of Hope

    Amirali Navaee’s new film, “Sunshine Express,” screening next at South by Southwest London, is a project more focused on hope than politics.For the Iranian writer and director Amirali Navaee, portraying his country is not about depicting sadness and tragedy, which he feels has come to define the onscreen portrayal of his home in recent years.Iranian filmmakers have been as much in the news as their films have been over the past decade. The writer and director Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran last year after being sentenced to eight years in prison while finishing “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which tells the story of a family torn apart by protests that were violently crushed by the Iranian government in 2022-23. His harrowing journey has been well-documented, and the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, with Rasoulof in attendance, where it received a special award from the competition jury. It was later nominated for best international feature at the Academy Awards.The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose films “A Separation” (2012) and “The Salesman” (2017) both won Oscars for best international feature, refused to attend the Academy Awards the second time he won in protest over President Trump’s executive order that blocked entry of citizens from Iran and several other predominantly Muslim countries to the United States.And “Un Simple Accident,” from the Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi, was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes last month. Panahi has been imprisoned several times in Iran because of his work but has continued to make movies in defiance of the Iranian government.“Sunshine Express” tells the story of people in a role-playing game who hope to win a cash prize.Distorted PicturesFor his first feature-length film, Navaee (pronounced nah-vah-YEE), who is also a choreographer and visual artist, said he wanted to express something more complex and less overtly political than other Iranian films. The project, “Sunshine Express,” debuted in February at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and is making its British premiere at South by Southwest London on Wednesday. Shot in a warehouse in Tehran on a small budget (Navaee, 42, said many of his friends helped finance the movie), it tells the story of people in a role-playing game on a train headed to a place called Hermia in the hopes of winning a cash prize.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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    Charles Wadsworth, Pianist and Champion of Chamber Music, Dies at 96

    As the founder, director and genial host of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, he helped drive the chamber music boom of the 1970s.Charles Wadsworth, a pianist who parlayed his Southern charm and his passion for chamber music into a career as the founder, director and host of important chamber series — including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York — and whose work helped propel the chamber music boom that began in the 1970s, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 96.His death, at a rehabilitation center, was confirmed by his wife, Susan.During his two decades as director of the Chamber Music Society, Mr. Wadsworth was the face of the organization, likely at any time to stride onto the stage of Alice Tully Hall with a broad grin, tousled blond hair and a boyish gait and offer folksy introductions to the music at hand.“I discovered very early that when people laugh, they relax,” Mr. Wadsworth told an interviewer in 2014. “They may be at a chamber music concert for the first time, or they may be unfamiliar with the repertory, but my feeling was that if I could get them relaxed, they would be open to listening, and to letting the music happen to them, rather than worrying about whether they understand it. And that seemed to work very well.”He also performed with the society, playing the piano, harpsichord or even the organ in staples of its repertory as well as some of the oddities he found while assembling the society’s programs — works like Anton Arensky’s Suite No. 1 for Two Pianos, François Couperin’s “Le Parnasse, ou L’Apothéose de Corelli” or Jan Zelenka’s Trio Sonata for Two Oboes, Bassoon and Continuo. But since the society’s roster included pianists who by Mr. Wadsworth’s own admission were more accomplished, he often deferred to them.His real accomplishments took place behind the scenes. Not least was the creation of the society itself, an organization meant to explore the breadth of the chamber music repertory, regardless of the instrumental (or vocal) combinations required. Mr. Wadsworth assembled a core group of “artist members” — string, wind and keyboard players with active careers, who would commit to performing with the society throughout the season — alongside guest musicians, who would expand the instrumental possibilities and bring an extra measure of star power.Mr. Wadsworth often performed with the Chamber Music Society. He played piano alongside the flutist Paula Robison, the violinist Jaime Laredo and the cellist Fred Sherry at Alice Tully Hall in 2009.JB Reed for The New York TimesWe 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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    Taylor Swift Buys Her Masters From Shamrock Capital, Reclaiming the Rights to Her First 6 Albums

    The master recordings to the pop superstar’s earliest work were sold to Scooter Braun in 2019, and acquired a year later by the investing firm Shamrock Capital.It was a business deal that led to one of the most ambitious recording projects in pop: When Taylor Swift’s catalog was sold in 2019 as part of a larger acquisition of the Nashville record company Big Machine, she said she would redo all of the affected albums to maintain some control over her creative work.Now the original recordings are hers again.On Friday, Swift announced on her website that she had bought her masters back from Shamrock Capital, the Los Angeles-based investment firm that was founded by Roy E. Disney, a nephew of Walt Disney. She did not disclose the price.“I can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now,” she wrote to fans. “The best things that have ever been mine … finally actually are.”In her statement, Swift said she now had ownership of all of her music videos, concert films, album art and photography and unreleased songs.Shamrock acquired the rights to Swift’s first six albums — “Taylor Swift” (2006), “Fearless” (2008), “Speak Now” (2010), “Red” (2012), “1989” (2014)” and “Reputation” (2017) — in 2020 from Scooter Braun, the music manager who shepherded Justin Bieber’s career and had worked with the longtime Swift adversary Kanye West, and his company Ithaca Holdings.Braun’s 2019 deal for the Big Machine Label Group, founded by Scott Borchetta and also home to country artists like Florida Georgia Line, Rascal Flatts and Thomas Rhett, was estimated at $300 million. Shamrock paid more than $300 million for Swift’s catalog, according to a person briefed on the deal.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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    Waiting for Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic Is Doing Fine

    Between music directors this season, the orchestra has been sounding fresh, engaged and more cohesive.The New York Philharmonic is flying free.Its former music director, Jaap van Zweden, left last summer. Its next, Gustavo Dudamel, is gradually deepening his commitment — including performances of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony at David Geffen Hall through Sunday — but doesn’t officially start until fall 2026.Those who follow orchestras tend to assume that their quality will dip without a devoted director to oversee things. Partly because of the myth of the indispensable, all-powerful maestro, it can be easy to fear that conductorless periods will be rudderless ones.That certainly hasn’t been the case this season at Geffen Hall. The Philharmonic has been sounding great: fresh, vital, engaged, more cohesive. The chilly blare that seemed to frost the hall’s acoustics when it reopened in 2022 after a renovation has warmed and softened.The most telling music-making of the year was in a program last month led by the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer. The final hour of the concert was given over to a rare performance of Bartok’s fairy-tale ballet “The Wooden Prince,” a sprawling, instrument-packed score that swerves from candied to bombastic, from radiant expanses to driving dances. The orchestra rose to the occasion with playing that was nuanced and colorful, and in Mozart’s “Turkish” Violin Concerto, the ensemble matched Lisa Batiashvili’s sensual flair.But in a way, I was even more impressed by the opener: Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute,” a chestnut of the kind that is often passed over quickly in rehearsal. It glowed.The true test of a great orchestra — what reveals its base line standard — isn’t how it does in the big symphonies and premieres that steal the lion’s share of attention and applause. It’s how the group sounds in little repertory standards, and that “Magic Flute” overture may have been the most encouraging seven minutes of the season.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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    Russell Brand Pleads Not Guilty to Rape and Sexual Assault Charges

    The comedian, actor and YouTuber is now scheduled to face a trial in June 2026.Russell Brand, the comedian, actor and conspiracy-minded YouTuber, appeared in a London courthouse on Friday and pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of rape and sexual assault.In a short hearing, Tony Baumgartner, the presiding judge, said that Mr. Brand would face a four-to-five-week trial starting on June 3, 2026. Britain’s judicial system has a backlog of cases, meaning there is often a delay between defendants entering a plea and standing trial.Mr. Brand, 49, is facing one charge of rape, one of oral rape, two counts of sexual assault and another of indecent assault.Those five charges involve four women. Prosecutors say the incidents occurred between 1999 and 2005, including one in which they claim Mr. Brand raped a woman in a hotel room during a political conference for the Labour Party.During the 10-minute hearing in a courthouse filled with tens of journalists, Mr. Brand, wearing a dark gray suit and striped shirt opened to reveal his chest, stood in a plexiglass box at the back of the courtroom and responded, “Not guilty,” when each of the charges was read out.Under British law, news media outlets are not allowed to identify anyone who makes sexual assault accusations unless the accuser chooses to waive the right to anonymity. Once criminal proceedings are underway, strict rules also prevent the reporting of information about the case that could prejudice a jury at trial.Before Friday’s hearing, Mr. Brand had strenuously denied all the charges. In April, he posted a video to his social media accounts in which he said that he had once been a “drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile,” but that he had “never engaged in nonconsensual activity.”Mr. Brand has been a star in Britain for decades and found fame with stand-up shows and as a TV and radio host for the BBC and MTV. After the period covered by the criminal charges, he gained a profile in the United States, too, when he starred in hit movies, including “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” in 2008. He was also briefly married to Katy Perry, the pop star.These days, Mr. Brand is best known as a politically charged YouTuber. He has over 6.7 million subscribers to his channel and over 11 million followers on X, where he posts videos that often touch on religion, conspiracy theories and conservative talking points. More