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      Billie Eilish Brings a Master Class in Intimacy to the Arena Stage

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      Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour opened in Canada on Sunday night, showcasing the 22-year-old pop star’s gift for dynamics, dramatics and audience engagement.A few songs into the first night of Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour at the Videotron Center in Quebec City, Billie Eilish challenged the sold-out crowd of 18,000 to play the quiet game. “It’s literally the only time in the entire show I’m going to say this,” assured the superstar, 22, who sat cross-legged on the floor at center stage, “because I don’t want silence, ever.”But there was a practical reason for the request: Eilish was about to record looped layers of her voice, so she could harmonize with herself while singing her hushed early hit “When the Party’s Over.” “I love doing my own vocal production,” she told the obliging audience, “and I thought I would bring that to the stage.”“I love you!” cried an ecstatic fan, who was promptly shushed by the entire arena.As Eilish built a lush bed of backing oohs and ahhs layer by layer, this hypnotic moment served a few purposes. It was a casual way to prove that she was singing live, and a clever means of bringing the intimacy of the bedroom recording studio — a fabled setting in the mythology of Eilish and her brother, the producer Finneas — to a massive, buzzing arena.After ascending from a luminescent cube in the center of the venue, Eilish spent most of the show bopping around a rectangular stage on the center of the floor. Julia Spicer for The New York TimesBut it was also a canny way to replicate a quintessential element of Eilish’s recordings — a whispery, ASMR-inducing hush — that can be difficult to evoke on an arena stage, where impassioned fans obscure the nuances of her voice by screaming every lyric back to her.Both ends of the dynamic spectrum are important to Eilish’s sound, a fact she underscores in the title of her adventurous third album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” In this accompanying live show, she modulated them expertly, suddenly transforming acoustic numbers into arena-rocking power ballads and playing the adoring audience like a well-tuned instrument.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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      Kris Kristofferson: 12 Essential Songs

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      The country singer and songwriter, who died on Saturday at 88, tucked enduring aphorisms into tales about facing up to loss.Kris Kristofferson, who was 88 when he died on Saturday, embedded enduring aphorisms into his songs. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” he observed in “Me and Bobby McGee.” In “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” he wrote, “Yesterday is dead and gone/And tomorrow’s out of sight.” And in “For the Good Times,” he urged, “There is no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning.”Those are stoic lines, delivered matter-of-factly, often tucked into tales about facing up to some kind of loss: of a lover, a friend, a hope, a chance, fleeting time. Kristofferson’s characters are often isolated, luckless, drunk or high, but they’re still seeking redemption or at least trying to move on — like Casey, in “Casey’s Last Ride,” who was “seeing his reflection in the lives of all the lonely men/who reach for anything they can to keep from going home.”Kristofferson established himself as a songwriter as the 1970s began, and his early songs were his most lasting ones. His willingness to sing unpretty stories and his homey melodies were foundations for the outlaw country movement of the 1970s. Bob Dylan has said, “You can look at Nashville pre-Kris and post-Kris, because he changed everything.”After a detour through 1970s movie stardom, Kristofferson shared the outlaw movement’s victory lap, in the 1980s, when he joined Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in the Highwaymen. He went on to write politically charged songs and the homilies of an elder. His voice was serviceable but not striking in his early years, and it grew much gruffer through the decades. But it was always forthright enough to put across the unvarnished substance of his music.Here, in chronological order, are 12 of Kristofferson’s essential songs. Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.‘Me and Bobby McGee’ (1970)Kristofferson’s own version of this tale of hitchhiking, harmonica-playing lovers, from his debut album, is far more wistful and less cathartic than Janis Joplin’s No. 1 hit version, released in 1971 after her death. Where she turned its outro of “la-da-das” into an ecstatic rave-up, Kristofferson lets them trail off, like a memory receding into the distance.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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      Oasis Adds North American Shows to Reunion Tour

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      Liam and Noel Gallagher’s band will stop in three American cities plus Toronto and Mexico City in August and September 2025.In August, when Oasis revealed a slew of reunion dates in Britain and Ireland starting next summer, the group said that plans were still underway for shows in “other continents outside of Europe.” That led to rampant speculation on social media — including purportedly leaked itineraries — about where the Britpop stars might go.Turns out that speculation was pretty close to reality. But not 100 percent right.The band announced on Monday that its world tour would include stops in Toronto, Mexico City, Chicago, Los Angeles and East Rutherford, N.J., outside New York — all of which figured prominently in online guessing, though dates and venues were not all as expected. The Oasis Live ’25 tour, led by Liam and Noel Gallagher, will be the famously combative band’s first since its implosion 15 years ago.Over the weekend, the band teased the announcement with billboards in Times Square and elsewhere pointing to 8 a.m. Eastern time and saying, “Be careful what you wish for.”“America,” the band said in a statement. “Oasis is coming. You have one last chance to prove that you loved us all along.”Fans had speculated about a wider world tour, with presumed dates in Australia and Asia, but none were announced on Monday.Even before the Gallagher brothers confirmed that Oasis would be getting back together, speculation about the Oasis reunion became front-page news in Britain, where the Gallaghers’ fisticuffs and insult trading has been hot copy for decades. After a month, they still have not confirmed any other members of the reunion band.The 19 shows announced so far in Britain and Ireland — including seven nights at Wembley Stadium in London — became immediate sellouts, and led to complaints about prices for some tickets spiking while fans were still in the queue to purchase them. A government agency, the Competition and Markets Authority, said it was opening an investigation into Ticketmaster’s handling of the sale, “including how so-called ‘dynamic pricing’ may have been used.”Registration for tickets to the North American shows was opened on the Oasis website, and the ticket sales will begin on Friday via Ticketmaster. More

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      Kris Kristofferson, Country Singer, Songwriter and Actor, Dies at 88

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      Kris Kristofferson, the singer and songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions infused country music with rarely heard candor and depth, and who later had a successful second career in movies, died at his home on Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday. He was 88.His death was announced by Ebie McFarland, a spokeswoman, who did not give a cause.Hundreds of artists have recorded Mr. Kristofferson’s songs — among them, Al Green, the Grateful Dead, Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips.Mr. Kristofferson’s breakthrough as a songwriter came with “For the Good Times,” a bittersweet ballad that topped the country chart and reached the Top 40 on the pop chart for Ray Price in 1970. His “Sunday Morning Coming Down” became a No. 1 country hit for his friend and mentor Johnny Cash later that year.Mr. Cash memorably intoned the song’s indelible opening couplet:Well, I woke up Sunday morningWith no way to hold my head that didn’t hurtAnd the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t badSo I had one more for dessert.Expressing more than just the malaise of someone suffering from a hangover, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” gives voice to feelings of spiritual abandonment that border on the absolute. “Nothing short of dying” is the way the chorus describes the desolation that the song’s protagonist is experiencing.Steeped in a neo-Romantic sensibility that owed as much to John Keats as to the Beat Generation and Bob Dylan, Mr. Kristofferson’s work explored themes of freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light.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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      Paris Opera: A Veteran Falstaff Looks Back, and Ahead

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      Ambrogio Maestri has sung the title role in Verdi’s comedy hundreds of times, most recently for the Paris Opera. He’s also making room for a Puccini tragedy.For Ambrogio Maestri, a bass-baritone, the title role of Verdi’s opera “Falstaff” has become nothing less than a second skin.“On the days when I’m happy or sad, he takes on a different shape,” he said between rehearsals for the Paris Opera.The Italian singer has performed the role about 400 times and in more than 20 different productions, he said. Falstaff, a gluttonous knight, is humiliated by the married women he courts, including Alice Ford, the ringleader of a plot to have him thrown into the Thames River. His latest performances have been at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, reprising Dominique Pitoiset’s classic 1999 staging.He will return to “Falstaff” at La Scala in Milan from Jan. 16 to Feb. 7 for the Giorgio Strehler production, in which he first appeared as the character in 2001.But Maestri, 54, does not live only for comedy. He has also plunged into the psyche of Scarpia, the sinister police chief in Puccini’s “Tosca,” which he will take on in mid-October at the Hamburg State Opera in Germany and again in February at the Vienna State Opera.He discussed his latest turn as Falstaff, and more, in a recent interview. The following conversation has been translated from Italian, edited and condensed.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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      At a French Chateau in Chantilly, a Feast of Music and Nature

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      Starting this year, a series of musical weekends in Chantilly, north of Paris, is teaming up with a gardening festival for a program with bucolic themes.Since 2021, the ornate Château de Chantilly and its imposing grounds, 30 miles north of Paris, have served as the backdrop for an intimate series of musical weekends.The series, Les Coups de Coeur à Chantilly, is intended, in part, to promote the site’s cultural importance and natural beauty. This month, it is putting a special emphasis on nature by collaborating with one of France’s most important gardening events.“It’s much more than a chateau,” Anne Miller, the general manager of the Château de Chantilly, whose estate encompasses about 284 acres of gardens and roughly 15,000 acres of forest, said in a recent interview.Musicians assembling before a performance in the stables of the Château de Chantilly during Les Coups de Coeur à Chantilly in September.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times“Here you have an art collection worthy of the Louvre,” she said from the grounds of the chateau, referring to the painting gallery of the Musée Condé, which features works by Raphael, Botticelli and Poussin, among others, and is used as one of the festival’s concert venues.“This melding between architecture, water, nature is pretty impressive,” she added. “And you have the stables for horse lovers.”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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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Parties, in His Own Words

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      For decades, Combs and other celebrities have commented on his party lifestyle. Here’s some of what they have publicly said.In 2005, when Sean Combs — also known as Diddy or Puff Daddy — hosted the MTV Video Music Awards, the network advertised the broadcast with a playful star-studded spoof called “Diddy Parties,” in which the events he hosted were referred to as “hedonistic romps.”It’s one of many examples that illustrate how the powerful music mogul’s reputation for hard-partying was an accepted part of the pop culture discourse. But since Combs’s arrest on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking this month, the lifestyle at the center of the criminal case has taken on a different light.Those who attended his events — whether his glitzy, A-list “white parties” or the “freak-offs” described in the indictment against him — have largely refrained from discussing their experiences in recent weeks. That hasn’t always been the case. In years past, celebrities have openly talked about his public-facing bashes and his general party habits.Here is some of what Combs and other stars have said about his party orbit.In His WordsIn a 1999 interview with Entertainment Tonight, in response to an interviewer who said, “Your parties are the hottest ticket around,” Combs said, “They won’t even give me a permit for the parties no more.”“They don’t want me to throw the parties no more, but we ain’t going to stop, we going to keep on having fun, bringing people together from all walks of life,” he continued. “You’re going to hear about my parties, they’re going to be shutting them down, they going to probably be arresting me, doing all types of crazy things just because we want to have a good time. Whenever you bring up a different element into people’s environment, things that broaden people’s horizons, people get intimidated.”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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      Sean Combs’s White Parties Were Edgy, A-List Affairs. Were They More?

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      The events helped the music mogul raise his profile. But one woman who worked at them has said in court papers that the parties had a dark side, too.In the 2000s, few events held the cultural cachet of the White Party thrown by Sean Combs — fetes in Beverly Hills, the Hamptons and other playgrounds of the rich, studded with famous names and fabulous tableaus.At the 2009 party, Demi Moore made the scene with Lil’ Kim, dancers gyrated in giant plastic balloons alongside tottering stilt walkers, and Ashton Kutcher swung, Tarzan-like, across a swimming pool as models in white bikinis lounged beside it.And at the center of it all was Mr. Combs, the billionaire hip-hop mogul also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, invariably toasting the scene with a glass of Cîroc vodka, and welcoming comparisons of his revels to those of lore.“Have I read ‘The Great Gatsby?’” Mr. Combs once told The Independent. “I am the Great Gatsby!”Today, Mr. Combs’s fortunes again invite comparison to Gatsby, though now through scandal. Prosecutors say Mr. Combs enlisted employees, enablers and prostitutes to stage far darker soirees than White Parties called “freak-offs” — drug-heavy, sometimes days-long hotel parties during which investigators say he abused and coerced participants into sexual acts, which he sometimes filmed and masturbated to.The criminal indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court this month has invited something of a reappraisal of the White Parties for some of those who reveled or worked at them. Were they merely innocuous, press-conscious branding events at which to see and be seen? Or was there, beyond the all-white facade, a darker element?Indeed, a recent lawsuit claims misdeeds occurred at those events, too: In July, Adria English, who was hired by Mr. Combs to work a series of White Parties in the mid-to-late 2000s, sued him, asserting she was plied with drugs and ecstasy-laced liquor at the events, and commanded to have sex with certain guests, making her into “a sexual pawn.” Jonathan Davis, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, denied in July that his client had ever “sexually assaulted or sex trafficked anyone.”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