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      A New Opera Shines Light on Ukrainian Families Separated by War

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      The Metropolitan Opera, hoping to revive support for Kyiv, released an excerpt from “The Mothers of Kherson,” about abducted Ukrainian children and their relatives.The Metropolitan Opera typically takes pains to keep developing works under wraps to give artists the space to make changes and take risks.But “The Mothers of Kherson,” an opera recently commissioned by the Met about abducted Ukrainian children and their relatives, is different. The company released an excerpt from the opera on Monday — more than a year before its premiere — hoping it might help revive support for Ukraine in its battle against Russia.“This is one way of fighting back,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “We don’t want the world to forget what’s going on. This is an artistic way of reminding them.”“The Mothers of Kherson,” by the Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets, with a libretto by the American playwright George Brant, tells the story of two mothers in the southern city of Kherson who embark on an arduous, 3,000-mile journey to rescue their daughters, who are being held by Russians at a camp in Crimea.The characters in the opera are fictional, but the story is based on the accounts of Ukrainian mothers who traveled into Russian-occupied territory, and back again, to recover their children. (In March, the State Department said it would pause funding for the tracking of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, under a program run by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab.)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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      ‘Mia’ to Continue Her Testimony as Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Trial Nears Midpoint

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      The former assistant will be questioned by Mr. Combs’s lawyers, who say her account of sex abuse and violence is at odds with the warmth she showed him on social media.The federal trial of Sean Combs is entering its fourth week, the midpoint of what is expected to be an eight-week trial, with prosecutors still filling out the particulars of a case that charges the music mogul with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.Jurors have heard from 21 witnesses in support of the government’s case that Mr. Combs was a violent and abusive man who controlled, intimidated and sexually violated women, and that he directed employees to commit arson, bribery, forced labor, obstruction of justice and other crimes on his behalf as part of a “criminal enterprise.”Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual arrangements were nonconsensual, arguing that the women who are part of the government’s case willingly consented to sex with Mr. Combs. If convicted of all charges, Mr. Combs, 55, could face life in prison.The witnesses in the case so far have included Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, who said she had been coerced intro drug-fueled sex marathons, and a former assistant, testifying under the pseudonym “Mia,” who said that her boss sexually assaulted her and subjected her to sleep deprivation and violence.Another witness, Deonte Nash, a stylist, described witnessing Mr. Combs’s violent attacks on Ms. Ventura, and said she told him that Mr. Combs had threatened to release explicit videos of her with other men in “freak-offs,” the sexual encounters that are at the heart of the government’s case. Ms. Ventura had called those videos “blackmail materials.”At a news conference at the White House on Friday, President Trump said that, if asked, he was open to reviewing a possible pardon for Mr. Combs — whom he crossed paths with decades ago on the celebrity scene in New York — if he was convicted.“I would certainly look at the facts,” Mr. Trump said.Mia, who testified on Thursday and Friday last week, will return to the stand on Monday for what should be the conclusion of her testimony. Under cross-examination on Friday, Brian Steel, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, showed Mia dozens of social media posts in which she repeatedly expressed affection and admiration for the music mogul. Mr. Steel asked how she could write such things if he had also abused her in the way she said.“I was young and manipulated and just eager to survive,” Mia said.The next witnesses suggest the government will further examine the circumstances of freak-offs. One witness, Eddy Garcia, was a supervisor at an InterContinential Hotel in Los Angeles, where a security camera recorded Mr. Combs attacking Ms. Ventura in 2016. Another expected witness, Frank Piazza, is a forensic video expert who examined that hotel footage. Other expected witnesses include Sylvia Okun, a hotel custodian, and a man named Enrique Santos. More

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      Hear the Sound of a New Generation of South Korean Musicians

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      Unsuk Chin, the curator of the Seoul Festival in Los Angeles, shares music by some of her favorite young composers and performers.“Compare Korea to China or Russia,” the composer Unsuk Chin said in a recent interview. “If you think how small the country is, it’s amazing how many talented musicians are coming out.”South Korean artists are prominent on classical music’s most prestigious stages. The young pianists Seong-Jin Cho and Yunchan Lim sell out Carnegie Hall. The conductor Myung-whun Chung was recently named the next music director of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Chin’s new opera, “The Dark Side of the Moon,” premiered in Hamburg in May.Now, to explore South Korea’s creative output, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is presenting the Seoul Festival from Tuesday through June 10.It is the latest in a series of themed Philharmonic events, including dives into Iceland and Mexico. Around 2018, the orchestra and its artistic leader at the time, Chad Smith, asked Chin to help plan a South Korean iteration, but the plans were derailed by the pandemic. About half of the original programming has made it intact onto this year’s concerts.“I really wanted to present the youngest generation of composers, conductors and musicians,” said Chin, 63.That generation has emerged from what she called “a very long cultural tradition.” The country’s embrace of Western musical culture began around the turn of the 20th century, and a Western-style compositional tradition took hold with figures like Isang Yun (1917-95), who wrote avant-garde music for Western instruments — but with a style that attempted to translate old-school Korean techniques.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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      Guy Klucevsek, Multi-Genre Accordion Virtuoso, Is Dead at 78

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      He elevated his instrument’s often-maligned reputation with deft musicianship, and by writing and commissioning a wide range of music.Guy Klucevsek, a masterly accordion player who developed an eclectic body of work for his beloved, if sometimes mocked, instrument that expanded its repertoire well beyond polkas and other traditional fare, died on May 22 at his home on Staten Island. He was 78.His wife and only immediate survivor, Jan (Gibson) Klucevsek, said the cause was pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.Praise for Mr. Klucevsek (pronounced kloo-SEV-ek) typically noted that he had elevated the profile of the accordion beyond the realms of beer halls and “The Lawrence Welk Show.”Writing in The Village Voice in 2015 about a series of performances by Mr. Klucevsek in the East Village, Richard Gehr noted that, “having mastered the instrument in virtually all of its classical, modern, jazz and international manifestations,” Mr. Klucevsek “has extended it into another dimension altogether.”Mr. Klucevsek performed with the dancer Claire Porter at the Kitchen in Manhattan in 2000.Hiroyuki Ito/Getty ImagesHe recorded more than 20 albums, composed dozens of pieces and commissioned others, in multiple genres. He accompanied the performance artist Laurie Anderson on her 1994 album, “Bright Red,” and collaborated with the dancer Maureen Fleming on “B. Madonna,” a 2013 multimedia piece based on the myth of Persephone.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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      Vienna’s Musical Message to Aliens: One, Two, Three. One, Two, Three.

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      Voyager craft have carried galaxies of information to and from space since 1977. Earthlings in Vienna are finally correcting one cultural omission.What would aliens make of the waltz?That was the big question on Saturday evening while the Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed Johann Strauss’s world-renowned “Blue Danube” waltz, as a 35-meter antenna in Cebreros, Spain, simultaneously transmitted a recording of it into space.The Vienna Tourist Board, which organized the event at the Museum of Applied Arts in collaboration with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the European Space Agency, said beaming the music into the cosmos was an effort to correct the record, as it were.In 1977, when the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft left the Earth with two copies of the Golden Record, which contains images, sounds and music from Earth, Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz did not make the cut. This was a mistake, according to Vienna’s tourism board, which is celebrating Strauss’s 200th birthday this year.After all, Strauss was the 19th-century equivalent of a pop star. According to Tim Dokter, the director of artistic administration for the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, back then, each composition for the waltz was like a hot new single. “People would wait for it, like, ‘Oh, a new waltz dropped today,’” Dokter said. “It was something new to dance to, like a new techno song.”With Voyager 1 already more than 15 billion miles from Earth, the farthest of any object humans have launched into the universe, there’s no way to make changes to the Golden Record. Instead, the “Blue Danube” waltz — traveling as an electromagnetic wave at the speed of light — will overtake the spacecraft and continue to soar into deep space.Will aliens be able to access the recording?“If aliens have a big antenna, receive the waves, convert them into music, then they could hear it,” said Josef Aschbacher, the director general of the European Space Agency.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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      Al Foster, Master of the Jazz Drums, Is Dead at 82

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      He was probably best known for his long tenure with Miles Davis, who praised his ability to “keep the groove going forever.”Al Foster, a drummer who worked with some of the most illustrious names in jazz across a career spanning more than six decades, leaving his distinctive stamp on important recordings by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson and many others, died on Wednesday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 82.His daughter Kierra Foster-Ba announced the death on social media but did not specify a cause.Mr. Foster came up emulating great bebop percussionists like Max Roach, but his most high-profile early gig came with Mr. Davis, who hired him in 1972, when he was refining an aggressive, funk-informed sound. Mr. Foster’s springy backbeats firmly anchored the band’s sprawling psychedelic jams.In “Miles: The Autobiography,” written with Quincy Troupe and published in 1989, Mr. Davis praised Mr. Foster’s ability to “keep the groove going forever.”Mr. Foster also excelled in a more conventional jazz mode, lending an alert, conversational swing to bands led by the saxophonists Mr. Henderson and Mr. Rollins and the pianists Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Tommy Flanagan.“What he was doing was reminiscent of some of the great drummers of our period,” Mr. Rollins said of Mr. Foster in a phone interview, citing foundational figures like Art Blakey and Max Roach. “He always had that feeling about him, those great feelings of those people. And that’s why I could never be disappointed playing with Al Foster. He was always playing something which I related to.”Mr. Foster often framed his long career as a fulfillment of his early ambitions.“I’ve been so blessed because I’ve played with everybody I fell in love with when I was a young teenager,” he told the website of Jazz Forum, a club in Tarrytown, N.Y.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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      These Fans Love ‘Pride & Prejudice’ a Billion Times Over

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      “Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice announced over speakers, “please welcome world-renowned pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet!”A roar erupted from hundreds of people dressed in their Regency-inspired finest: tailcoats and dresses with puffed shoulders, costume jewelry and ringlet-curled hair. They crowded around a small Steinway piano to the side of a makeshift stage, whose backdrop was like a billboard: a purple expanse with the image of Keira Knightley in a bonnet and the text “Pride & Prejudice: Twentieth Anniversary.”Roger Kisby for The New York TimesIt was a Comic Con for the Jane Austen set, an enormous party thrown by Focus Features for one of its most beloved films, Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice.” Inside the Viennese Ballroom at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena, Calif., fans of the movie recently gathered for the rare opportunity to hear Thibaudet perform Dario Marianelli’s soundtrack.Thibaudet, dressed in custom Vivienne Westwood designed for the occasion, took his seat at the piano and began to play “Dawn,” the tone-setting theme from the start of the film, in which a freely repeating note gives way to an instantly endearing melody over gentle waves of arpeggios. A hush swept through the room, and people held up their phones to record. Two friends held each other and cried; one took a video as the other wiped away her tears.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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      Miley Cyrus Told Us to Ask Her Anything

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      Miley Cyrus’s entire life has been shaped by fame. Born at the height of her father Billy Ray Cyrus’s celebrity, she spent her childhood at his sold-out country concerts. At 13, she became a star herself — and an important part of the Disney machine — as the titular lead in “Hannah Montana,” playing a regular girl by day and a pop star by night and becoming a cultural touchstone for millennial kids.By the time Cyrus left the show, she already had dozens of Billboard Hot 100 hits, but industry and tastemaker respect was harder to come by. As with many former female child stars, her transition to adulthood in the public eye was marked by controversy (twerking with Robin Thicke at the 2013 Video Music Awards) and judgment (the Parents Television Council condemned the performance), which she looks back on today with some bitterness at how she was treated.Now 33, Cyrus is one of pop’s reigning female queens, a status cemented by her first Grammy win for her 2023 megahit “Flowers.” Her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful,” has just been released, and she says it’s her attempt to reimagine what “beautiful” means — her beloved grandmother’s death, for instance, or the emotion of rage, which she told me is beautiful because “it lets you know you’re alive.” We also spoke at length about her close relationship with her mother, Tish Cyrus-Purcell, her repaired relationship with her father and how she has learned to protect herself in a world that is still fascinated by everything she does. But we started by talking about the first time I interviewed her, when her candor and openness quite honestly freaked me out.The Grammy-winning singer on overcoming child stardom, accepting her parents and being in control.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppYou know, I’ve interviewed you before. You look really familiar to me.No, we never saw each other because I was at NPR. The voice!I was a new host back then. I hadn’t done a lot of celebrity interviews, and you came on and said: “Ask me anything. Anything at all.” And I had no idea what to do with that. I just froze and thought, I don’t know what to ask Miley Cyrus if she’s saying, “Ask me anything.” Would you say something like that now? I think I would say something like that now, but maybe paying a little closer attention. But yeah, you can ask me anything. I’ve learned that I’m in control. The worst that happens is I just leave the room — say, “I’ll be right back,” and then don’t come back. More