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      Tory Lanez Is Expected to Be Sentenced for Shooting Megan Thee Stallion

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      The Canadian rapper was found guilty in December of shooting Megan Thee Stallion in both her feet during an argument.The Canadian rapper and singer Tory Lanez is expected to be sentenced on Monday for shooting Megan Thee Stallion, a fellow artist and onetime friend, in both of her feet during an argument in the summer of 2020. Details of the assault came out gradually via social media and evolving law enforcement accounts, leading to a yearslong legal saga that became tawdry tabloid fodder while also generating broader conversation about the treatment of Black women in music and beyond.Prosecutors are seeking a 13-year sentence for Mr. Lanez, born Daystar Peterson, arguing that he lacked remorse and was “clearly incapable of accepting any responsibility for his own actions,” citing “a campaign to humiliate and retraumatize the victim” following the shooting.“The defendant actively invited harassment of the victim by spreading misinformation to his large following in an effort to galvanize the public against the victim and even the prosecution team without any regard to the dangers it posed,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “The defendant has weaponized misinformation to his large following to such a degree that it has left a lasting traumatic impact on the victim.”Mr. Lanez was found guilty in December of three felony counts: assault with a semiautomatic handgun, carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle and discharging a firearm with gross negligence. He faces a maximum of 22 years and eight months in prison, as well as potential deportation to Canada.Lawyers for Mr. Lanez, 31, had filed a motion for a new trial, arguing that Instagram posts and a tattoo shown in court were prejudicial evidence, but the judge denied their request in May. Prosecutors had said the defense’s motion was “replete with colorful rhetoric” but lacked substance and failed to “cite a single instance of error in the trial court.”Following that hearing, Mr. Lanez told the judge: “Please don’t ruin my life. I could be your son, I could be your brother.”Ahead of the trial, the two artists had traded barbs in songs and online for more than a year.Megan Thee Stallion, born Megan Pete, testified that Mr. Lanez, with whom she had a brief romantic entanglement, fired at her several times after she exited a vehicle that was taking them home from a pool party at the reality star Kylie Jenner’s residence. According to testimony, a drunken fight about relationships and careers had erupted between the two artists and another friend in the S.U.V., Kelsey Harris.Megan Thee Stallion testified in the trial in December, saying Mr. Lanez had offered her a million dollars for her silence.Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesMegan Thee Stallion initially told responding officers that she had stepped on glass, explaining later that she had been on high alert after the police killing of George Floyd and was also worried about how “snitching” on Mr. Lanez would affect her career in hip-hop. Following initial coverage of the case, in which Mr. Lanez was charged only with weapons possession, Megan Thee Stallion named the rapper as her assailant on Instagram.She testified that Mr. Lanez had apologized, and offered her and Ms. Harris a million dollars each to keep quiet about the shooting.On the stand, Ms. Harris declined to identify Mr. Lanez as the gunman, even as the defense put forth a theory that she may have shot her friend out of jealousy. But in earlier text messages and an interview with detectives that were also presented to the jury, Ms. Harris corroborated Megan Thee Stallion’s story.Mr. Lanez’s sentencing had originally been scheduled for January but was rescheduled several times as he hired new lawyers and sought a new trial. The rapper’s defense team argued that the jury might have been improperly swayed by a shirtless photo of Mr. Lanez that revealed a firearm tattoo, saying it could paint him as “a gun-wielding career criminal.” It also said the potential that prosecutors would use Mr. Lanez’s lyrics against him had “impermissibly chilled” his right to testify. More

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      For Dua Lipa, Just Being a Pop Star Isn’t Enough

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      Though the singer has maintained a strict line between her music and her private life, she’s leveraging her personal passions in a bid to become a media mogul.LET’S GET THIS out of the way: Dua Lipa is finishing her third album. It’s due for release in 2024 and, despite the trend of musicians announcing and delaying records for years, Lipa will almost certainly meet her deadline. It’s funny to think of a pop star — or any successful young artist — as just another striving professional. But at 27, Lipa has already become the kind of multihyphenate entrepreneur who not only finishes her assignments on time but discusses strategy and efficiency with the clarity of a company founder delivering a TED Talk. “If I wasn’t as organized as I am, I would be a mess right now,” she says when we meet one drizzly May afternoon in London. The singer had asked one of her favorite restaurants, Sushi on Jones, hidden on the second floor of a King’s Cross concert venue, to open before dinner so we could have the place to ourselves, then arrived 10 minutes early to make sure everything was as planned.A lot happened in March 2020, so you probably won’t recall that Lipa’s second album, “Future Nostalgia,” leaked at the beginning of the lockdowns, denying her the precise rollout she’d spent many months finessing, postponing her international tour . . . and unintentionally cementing her as the leading pop star of the pandemic. Her barrage of shimmery singles — music for “dance crying,” as she describes it — later established her as the only female artist with two albums that have surpassed 10 billion streams on Spotify.The next record will still be pop, she says, lest her “fans have a meltdown.” She doesn’t want to “alienate” them, although she’s developing a new sound that may be informed less by the house and disco beats beneath songs like “Physical” and “Hallucinate” than by 1970s-era psychedelia. She’s working with a smaller group of songwriting collaborators, supposedly including Kevin Parker of the Australian psych-rock band Tame Impala, a rumor she all but confirms by denying: “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, then looks away and laughs a little. Lipa’s dressed — almost studiously — in pop star-off-duty drag: Ugg slip-ons, baggy white jeans, an old Elton John T-shirt, a few diamond-encrusted hoops in each ear.She can come across as guarded, a little aloof, cool but not necessarily cold, which could be the way she’s been her whole life — or the result of having become globally famous during a period of deep isolation. She lacks the impulse, so common among people her age, to make unnecessary small talk or feign friendliness in order to appear likable. Instead, she remains assiduously on message, implying several times that she feels that journalists are usually trying to trap her or tease out information before she’s ready to share it. “Especially being in the public eye, someone’s always waiting for you to trip or fail or whatever,” she tells me. During our meal, which was arranged to last 90 minutes and ends exactly on time, “whatever” is one of the words she uses most, in a way that makes her sound wary of having to narrativize her own life.But she’s particularly taciturn about the forthcoming album because it’s still in development — a process that’s “insular and exciting,” she says, even if “you have no idea what the reaction is going to be once it’s out, so there’s this nervous feeling” — but also because there’s so much else she prepared to discuss today: not herself, not the music, but the other elements comprising Lipa’s unusual plan for longevity, something she’s been working toward since she was 5, when she used to lead her classmates in schoolyard dance routines.AFTER HER TOUR concluded last November, Lipa arrived in London and began focusing on several non-music projects, as well as cooking and relaxing in the house she’s renovating in North London, near where she was raised by a pair of Albanian immigrants, Dukagjin and Anesa Lipa. They’d fled Kosovo in 1992, during the conflicts in the region, then eventually returned to Pristina, the capital; four years after that, they let their eldest daughter (Dua, whose name means “love” in Albanian) move back to England by herself when she was 15, where she briefly modeled and began to pursue music: Two years later, after appearing in a 2013 commercial for “The X Factor,” she signed with Ben Mawson, Lana Del Rey’s manager.Here in London — where her parents, younger brother (Gjin, 17) and sister (Rina, 22, an up-and-coming model) also live again — she enjoys eating vegetable samosas at Gymkhana and drinking orange wine at Westerns Laundry. Among her friends, who predate her fame and, she says, “ignore me in my own kitchen,” she’s the one who plans birthday dinners and trips. Many of these restaurants and destinations end up in Service95, the arts and culture newsletter she launched in February of last year after wanting a place to write about the bakeries, bookstores and other venues she’d been keeping lists of since she was a teenager.On the CoversMiu Miu top, $695, briefs, $1,020 and $360 (worn underneath), tights, $320, and shoes, $1,270, miumiu.com; and her own earring.Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Carlos NazarioCeline by Hedi Slimane dress, price on request, celine.com; Van Cleef & Arpels ring, $63,500, vancleefarpels.com; and her own earrings.Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Carlos NazarioShe’s currently recording a third season of her podcast, “Dua Lipa: At Your Service,” an accompaniment to Service95, for which Lipa interviews fellow artists like the singer Billie Eilish and the actor Dan Levy; queer activists like Brandon Wolf, who fights for gun reform after having survived the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.; and writers like Min Jin Lee and Esther Perel (as well as Hanya Yanagihara, this magazine’s editor in chief). She finishes each conversation by asking for a list of recommendations, whether that’s Los Angeles restaurants (Levy) or activists to follow (Wolf); her hope, she says, is to be of service to her readers and listeners, many of whom were likely born around 1995, when she was, hence the name. Earlier this summer, she created a Service95 book club; Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain” (2020), a gay coming-of-age story set in working-class Glasgow, was her first pick. Lipa also released a fashion collection that she co-designed with Donatella Versace, full of butterfly-print bikinis and floral stretch dresses. Its theme was La Vacanza, Italian for “vacation,” mirroring Lipa’s dominant, if slightly ironic, aesthetic on Instagram, where it looks like all she ever does is relax by a pool.Not long after, she’d appear as a mermaid in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a fitting acting debut, given that it’s based on a doll who’s a former teenage fashion model and, in a single afternoon, bounces between her many demanding professions. “I don’t even want to show you my phone, because I’m embarrassed about it, but it’s really down to the minute: where I’m going, what I’m doing,” Lipa tells me, then opens her calendar app, frowns and eventually turns the screen in my direction. “Wake up, glam, prep for podcast,” she says, scrolling through a day of appointments. “I have to watch ‘Succession,’ so I’ve got to schedule that,” she adds, pointing at the 7 p.m. slot, which is also when she’ll eat dinner. She even plans her showers, wherever she can fit them in. “For as long as I’m having fun, I’m going to keep making music,” she says. “But why can’t I do other things that I love, too?”IF THE DREAM of pop stardom is far-fetched for all but a few, the musical aspect of Lipa’s empire is, oddly, the least unique thing about it: With her husky voice and relatably imperfect dance moves, she releases catchy, inspirational who-needs-men anthems in collaboration with some of the world’s greatest audio minds and businesspeople. All of them have chosen to put millions of dollars into manufacturing and promoting her earwormy singles not only because she’s talented and beautiful and has good sonic instincts but also because she is — unlike most of her predecessors and peers — admittedly, almost defiantly, not sloppy. “I’ve probably spent more time waiting for artists to show up in the studio than I have working with artists,” says Mark Ronson, the 47-year-old record producer who has made two singles with Lipa, including “Dance the Night” from this summer. “If she’s two minutes late — literally, if it’s 12:02 — there’s a text: ‘Sorry, running five minutes late.’ That’s not superstar behavior, you know? She still works with the mind-set that she hasn’t [made it] yet.” Lipa’s particularly good at editing, he adds, at tediously working and reworking a chorus or melody. She’s comfortable making decisions quickly and multitasking: Sometimes while she’s onstage doing her choreography, she says, she’s also thinking about what she’s going to eat afterward.Pop, like all genres of creative expression, is more commercialized than ever. The musicians themselves are making less and less money, and those who grew up listening to artists like Britney Spears, Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse (whom Lipa’s soulful raspiness sometimes summons) have clearly internalized the tragic lessons of those lives and careers. As women in a field driven by sex appeal — it’s no accident that Lipa announced her book club with some swimsuit selfies — they learn early on that people are constantly trying to use them. The smart ones, then, become alert to opportunities to diversify their portfolios and work their way to a kind of moguldom that outlasts radio trends. They grapple with the fact that popular music is a cat-and-mouse game, in which singers must switch up their sound often (while never straying too far from their original persona); refrain from releasing records too frequently so that their fans don’t get bored; and yet recognize, even then, that the audience and the industry might still discard them once they’re in their 30s.Rihanna, who hasn’t released an album since 2016, has her multibillion-dollar Fenty Beauty line; Ariana Grande will soon star as Glinda in Universal’s “Wicked” juggernaut. Lipa, who has filed trademarks for merchandise including cosmetics and will appear next year in the spy film “Argylle,” has made inroads in both of those directions; watching her and her cohorts’ shared trajectory, you get the sense that they’re expanding into other realms as early and as widely as they can, in part to guarantee their ubiquity but also to ensure against obsolescence. But with her multipronged pursuits (most of which fall under the banner of Service95, “the ultimate cultural concierge,” according to its tag line), Lipa’s approach is distinct in that she’s leading with ideas and information, not products, curating culture in addition to contributing to it. What began as a minimally designed newsletter created with a few former magazine editors — the issues are free and the first one featured short pieces about South African house music and the Irish disability advocate and writer Sinéad Burke — has since grown to accommodate YouTube cooking videos, live book talks with authors (hosted by Lipa) and reported series dedicated to such topics as men’s mental health and the spiking crisis in London, where young people are unknowingly being drugged by strangers at bars.Service95 represents who Lipa is “behind closed doors,” she says, a space where discussions around trans liberation are as common as those about jewelry and yoga. Though she’s a young, ambitious millennial, the content reflects the very Gen Z belief that all art and culture must be motivated by social justice and that all artists must talk about their ethics and values (at least those deemed palatably progressive) in all contexts and environments. “My intention is never to be political … but there’s a political bent to my existence,” Lipa says. “The easiest thing you can do is just hide away and not have an opinion about anything.” The singer is nevertheless cautious about how she lets her contributors use this microphone. She knows she’s the one who would face repercussions if a problem arose, so she approves every story herself and leads weekly editorial meetings. If it continues to grow, Service95 might one day replace the glossy, feminist-leaning fashion magazines of the 2000s; right now, it’s reminiscent of the chatty, lo-fi publications that the aughts-era blogger Tavi Gevinson offered young fans with “Rookie” before becoming an actress.“I think it’s a marketing tool: How confessional can you be?” she says. “I also don’t put so much of my life out there for people to dig into the music in this weird, analytical way.”Lipa, however, has taken the reverse course: Rather than amassing enough access and power within media to eventually jettison the industry for something more glamorous, she’s using her celebrity to expose her readers to everything she’s witnessing from her perch. “The world is really big, and maybe things don’t get to your [corner], so it’s a way of bringing everything together,” she says. This is a canny strategy, for it implies that Lipa’s a normal woman who just hustled her way into an abnormally charmed life while somehow staying grounded. It also makes her seem generous, despite the occasional tone-deaf moment, as when she wrote last November that she “saves up” to go shopping at Amore, the Tokyo vintage luxury handbag emporium.Among famous women turned media mavens, a category that has recently grown to include the talk show hosts Drew Barrymore and Kelly Clarkson, Lipa’s closest analog might be Gwyneth Paltrow, although Goop is much larger and more lucrative than Service95. Lipa won’t share audience metrics, but she does plan to bring some readers together at a forthcoming event series that will focus on food, wine and books. (“Like Oprah?” I ask, but she shrugs off the comparison: “We don’t really have Oprah [in London].”) She’s more inspired by Reese Witherspoon, the actress best known for playing Type A go-getters like Tracy Flick in “Election” (1999) who later became one of the first celebrities to launch her own book club, partly to create a pipeline of women-centered stories that her company could option for film and television. Maybe Lipa will do something like that, she tells me, but she hasn’t thought of a model “to base Service95 on, which is cool because then it can be its own thing,” she adds, sounding like the content executive she’s becoming. “I’ve found being in the media this way very encouraging.”She is, after all, a woman about whom many things have been written who now gets to write the story herself. In the newsletter, this takes the form of a short, paragraph-long editor’s letter. But on the podcast, the third season of which is now running weekly in partnership with the BBC, Lipa’s more present. Before speaking with each of her guests in conversations that can last an hour or longer, she says she does four or five days of research; Lisa Taddeo, a 43-year-old journalist who published the nonfiction sex narrative “Three Women” in 2019, told me the singer was among the most natural interviewers she’s talked to, “impeccably prepared, yet off book in the most conversational way.” What Lipa’s doing is different than journalism, though, if only because, as she admits, she avoids bringing up anything that might make her interviewees uncomfortable. She typically deflects inquiries about herself in favor of gathering advice from her subjects, who seem to open up in these conversations; it’s easy to forget that they’re speaking with another artist rather than any other geekily inquisitive host.Last September, Monica Lewinsky went on the show, where she discussed the Clinton sex scandal and how she recovered from her despair. She was nearly “publicly humiliated to death,” she says, after which Lipa lets out a heavy sigh. “Something that really struck me was how feminists agonized over you,” Lipa responds. “Whether you were using your own agency. Were you a victim? And I really wonder how this has evolved, and how this experience has defined your own relationship with the feminist movement because, for me, it completely blew me away that feminism then isn’t how we know it now, and maybe abuse of power wasn’t at the top of the list.”“It was your generation,” Lewinsky later reminds her, “that insisted on re-evaluating my story.” After their conversation, Lipa decided that the interviews in the third season should each be dedicated to a single topic, much like Lewinsky’s was centered on shame and healing. For the first episode, which premiered in June, the singer made what felt like a self-referential gambit: She invited on the English YouTuber Amelia Dimoldenberg, the host of the series “Chicken Shop Date” — in which she awkwardly interviews actresses like Jennifer Lawrence and Keke Palmer in a fast-food restaurant — to discuss “how to grow your empire and build your brand,” as Lipa says in her editor’s note announcing the episode. Dimoldenberg’s advice: “Especially for women … you feel like you have to please everyone, you have to come across a certain type of way where you’re not being a diva,” to which Lipa murmurs in agreement. “Believe in your idea,” Dimoldenberg adds. “That’s the most important thing.”Gucci coat (with brooch), $12,900, pants, $5,200, sunglasses, $695, and shoes, $1,250, gucci.com; and Skims bra, $34, skims.com.Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Carlos NazarioEVEN IF LIPA can do all of this, the question remains: Why? Obviously, she could fill her days just being a massively successful musician. But a few weeks after our lunch, she tells me over the phone that she would be “doing a disservice” to herself if she weren’t “exploring all the things [she] loved and wanted to share.” It’s similar to other explanations she’s given me: She likes “being thrown into the deep end” and acquiring new skills, above all those that are “aligned” with her “activism and love of reading.” She’s been interested in media since high school, especially after her father got a master’s degree in journalism when he returned to Kosovo. (He became her manager last year after she parted ways with Mawson.) She wants to honor the sacrifices her parents made; these various gigs satisfy “what’s maybe the immigrant mentality … this thing I have in my head where I know that, if I don’t work hard enough, the rug could just be pulled from under my feet.” If the music stops bringing in audiences, maybe these other enterprises will.She never says that last part; she probably never would. She also doesn’t say what I think is the real answer, which is this: Anyone who works in media can tell you that there’s no better way to lead the conversation without ever having to actually talk about yourself. While Lipa’s editorial initiative may seem like an act of self-exposure, it’s in fact one of self-protection — it allows her to connect regularly with her audience by sharing her favorite Spanish wine, the public art installations she enjoyed visiting in rural Japan, the causes or activists or artists she cares about. Sharing a lifestyle, however, is different than sharing a life.During the rare instances when she has to address something more intimate, her own outlets are the ideal way to disseminate the message. After DaBaby, a rapper featured on a remix of her song “Levitating,” was videotaped making homophobic comments at a 2021 music festival, Lipa wrote a statement on Instagram, where she has 88.6 million followers, renouncing him and encouraging her fans to fight the stigma around H.I.V./AIDS. That sort of direct communication “was something artists didn’t have before,” she says. “Whatever was said about you in the press, that was it: That’s who you are.”In 2021, an organization founded by the American Orthodox rabbi Shmuley Boteach ran a full-page ad in The New York Times accusing Lipa of antisemitism after she defended Palestinian human rights. Her representatives asked the paper’s leaders to apologize, but they didn’t. For more than two years, Lipa has turned down all coverage opportunities in The Times. Then she convinced Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s former executive editor, to come on her podcast last December. When she brought up the controversy, he had little to say about the company’s decisions (he still works here), explaining the church-and-state divisions between editorial and advertising departments. To her, the exchange went as anticipated: “It was enough for me to voice it to the guy at the top,” and she could then move on from something that had bothered her for years.All these decisions are hers to make, of course — she owes the public no more or no less than she chooses. Still, it’s interesting, novel even, to watch a celebrity build a brand off her own interests and obsessions, rather than allow her private life to become an interest and obsession of others. Since the dawn of Madonna, we’ve expected pop stars (and indeed all female artists) to bare all — to reference their mental health struggles (Lady Gaga) or their partners’ cheating scandals (Beyoncé) — only to judge and punish them for doing so. Lipa refuses to engage on that level. Her music, too, avoids the strange dissonance of other female artists (Taylor Swift; Adele) who’ve achieved success by exposing everyday secrets and sadnesses, only to find themselves stuck looping those same narratives now that their lives aren’t so relatable. Lipa won’t sing about those kinds of Easter eggs: “I think it’s a marketing tool: How confessional can you be?” she says. “I also don’t put so much of my life out there for people to dig into the music in this weird, analytical way.”The next album will be “more personal,” she offers, but that’s not why she’s doing it. Two days before we’d met for sushi, Lipa had been rewatching “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” the 2020 documentary about the Bee Gees, “just bawling my eyes out,” she says, with her boyfriend, Romain Gavras, a 42-year-old French Greek film director. (Tellingly, her relationship with Gavras is the only thing her publicist asked that I not bring up myself.) In the film, someone talks about “music that just makes your body feel good,” she explains. “Those are the songs I get attached to — that’s the kind of feeling I want to convey.” Already, she’s proved herself adept as a singer in conjuring those sorts of sensations. But as she keeps talking, I notice that the ordinary gesture of recommending a film I haven’t seen is making her feel good, too. “You should definitely watch it,” she says, interrupting her thoughts about her own music. “It’s amazing. I cry every time.”Hair by Rio Sreedharan for the Wall Group. Makeup by Samantha Lau. Set design by Afra Zamara for Second Name. Production: Farago Projects. Manicurist: Michelle Humphrey for LMC Worldwide. Photo assistants: Daniel Rodriguez Serrato, Enzo Farrugia, Hermine Werner. Set designer’s assistants: Tatyana Rutherston, Viola Vitali, Oualid Boudrar. Tailor: Sabrina Gomis Vallée. Stylist’s assistants: Martí Serra, Alexis Landolfi, Anna Castellano More

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      Pianist Nicolas Hodges Adapts to Life With Parkinson’s

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      Nicolas Hodges has carried on with his career as an eminent interpreter of avant-garde music. But it hasn’t been without sacrifices.In the fall of 2018, the pianist Nicolas Hodges noticed his body shaking. He brought it up at a routine doctor’s appointment in Tübingen, Germany, where he lives. The doctor said it was probably stress, but recommended that he make an appointment with a neurologist.Hodges didn’t make that appointment right away. But then, in January 2019, the shaking caused him to play a wrong note during a performance.“It became instantly clear that I had to find out what was going on,” he said.Dr. Klaus Schreiber, a neurologist and a classical music lover, observed Hodges performing a few minor physical tasks — walking across a room, undressing and dressing — before he sent him for a series of tests that confirmed Hodges had Parkinson’s disease.Dr. Schreiber estimated that Hodges had been performing with Parkinson’s for three years.Hodges, 53, is a leading interpreter of contemporary classical music. As a soloist and chamber musician, he has premiered and recorded works by many important composers of this century, and the last. Recently, his symptoms have forced him to reduce and prioritize his performing commitments.The worst symptoms, which rarely occur, can leave him feeling, he said, as if he “just couldn’t play the piano.” But the diagnosis has also strengthened his dedication to his artistry and the contemporary repertoire.Physical limits have forced Hodges to make “aesthetic decisions,” he said, to select what music to commission and to perform with greater rigor. The diagnosis has “made me try to focus even more on what multiple contradictory things are most important to me.”Hodges has formidable technique and an ability to make the form of even highly complex pieces clearly audible. His tone color on the piano can shift from vinegary to supple in seconds. He is strikingly adaptable to the widely divergent visions of various contemporary composers. In John Adams’s “China Gates” (1977), Hodges has combined rhythmic propulsion with tiptoe delicacy. In Brian Ferneyhough’s opera “Shadowtime” (2004), he tackled a prismatically virtuosic solo while asking enigmatic questions out loud, like “What is the cube root of a counterfactual?” In Simon Steen-Andersen’s Piano Concerto (2014), he faced off against a video projection of himself at a smashed grand piano.Hodges, front, in Brian Ferneyhough’s “Shadowtime” at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2005.©Stephanie BergerIn 2020, Hodges recorded “A Bag of Bagatelles,” which wove together works by Beethoven and Harrison Birtwistle, a close collaborator. The juxtaposition illuminates the complexity, unpredictability and orchestral scale that animate the music of two composers centuries apart. Looking back, Hodges realized that he had recorded the album with untreated Parkinson’s disease.HODGES WAS BORN in London in 1970. His father was a studio manager at the BBC who later worked in computing, and his mother was a professional opera singer. Hodges began playing the piano at age 6 and composing at 9. Among his early pieces was the first scene of an opera based on the Perseus myth.Hodges attended elementary school at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford, where he took lessons on the viola, the oboe, the harpsichord and the organ, in addition to the piano. He sang in the Christ Church Cathedral Choir, performing works like Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at the Royal Festival Hall under Simon Rattle.“We were woken up earlier than the rest of the school to practice,” Hodges said. The students who didn’t play music “got half an hour more sleep than I did the whole of my childhood.”For secondary school, Hodges went to Winchester College, in Hampshire, where Benjamin Morison, a pianist and composer who is now a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, introduced Hodges to contemporary music by playing an LP of music by Birtwistle and Gyorgy Kurtag. Hodges and Morison performed an arrangement of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for two pianos and Pierre Boulez’s restless “Structures II” for their teachers and fellow students at Winchester, to bemused reactions.“I remember him being very precise — and encouraging me to be precise — and extremely musical,” Morison said of Hodges in a phone interview. “He was able to make the music speak as music.”In 1986, Hodges took a seminar with the composer Morton Feldman at the Dartington Summer School, where Feldman impressed upon him the seriousness of the experimental avant-garde. Hodges also played in a band that covered songs by the Sex Pistols and the Sisters of Mercy.Hodges has made a career as an avant-garde specialist, eventually working with the composers he idolized during his musical upbringing.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesIt was a heady and influential time. “I was improvising; I was listening to weird, dark, funky music, and playing Debussy,” Hodges said.For several years, he considered pursuing composition, to the dismay of his more traditionally minded mother. At age 23, he decided to refocus on the piano. “I just was having more fun as a pianist,” he said. “Composing is too much hard work.”As part of that decision, Hodges began studying with the pianist Sulamita Aronovsky, who had defected to Britain from the Soviet Union. A car crash shortly after the move had ended her career as a performer. “She used to say to me, whenever I would come to her lesson and complain, ‘Mr. Hodges, you have to accept everyone has these problems,’” he recalled. “‘It’s the people who get past these problems who have careers.’”Hodges has since performed as a soloist with orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra — usually in contemporary repertoire and often with pieces written for him. He is a professor of piano at the State University of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart, Germany, and almost constantly premieres new work solo and in chamber music formations.“All these composers that we had idolized when we were teenagers, he has subsequently commissioned pieces from,” said Morison, who remains close with Hodges. “It’s an extraordinary thrill to witness that.”WHEN HODGES RECEIVED his diagnosis, the news came with conflicting emotions. The first, Hodges recalled, was a certain cockiness. “I’m going to be a medical miracle,” he thought to himself. “I’m going to carry on whatever happens.”When that phase passed, Hodges felt relief. He had a clear diagnosis, and the dopamine treatments prescribed by Dr. Schreiber helped. “The medication makes it possible for me to sometimes feel and play like I don’t have it,” Hodges said. “When you’re suffering from something like that and you’re untreated, you feel like you’re getting old before your time, you feel like your children have worn you out — and my poor children were blamed for that.”Hodges has had to make painful decisions while prioritizing performing commitments. Since 2012, he has played in Trio Accanto, an ensemble consisting of Hodges, the German percussionist Christian Dierstein and the Swiss saxophonist Marcus Weiss. The group has toured Europe’s major new-music festivals and recorded six albums of contemporary music together.Hodges performed Rebecca Saunders’s “to an utterance” earlier this year, and plans to play a new solo work she is writing for him.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesWhen Dierstein and Weiss learned of Hodges’s diagnosis, they were shaken. “We’re scared, and we are as concerned and sad as we were when we first found out,” Dierstein said in a video interview. “But it was always clear to us that we want to continue playing with Nic and that we’ll take the illness into account.”After a period of reflection during the coronavirus pandemic, Hodges decided to withdraw from Trio Accanto. He found the logistics involved in traveling to concerts and dealing with the complex instrumental setups required by many pieces too taxing. The 2024-25 season will be Hodges’s last with the group.Playing with Trio Accanto “was ideal chamber music for me,” Hodges said. But, he added, “Parkinson’s makes it necessary for my life to be simple.”Hodges has also learned to structure the doses of his medication — including a dopamine inhaler, a receptor agonist patch and extended-release pills — in a way that supports his concert roster. This often requires stark sacrifices: He essentially schedules the worst of his symptoms.In February, Hodges performed Rebecca Saunders’s “to an utterance” for piano and orchestra, a work composed for him, at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. A final rehearsal the afternoon of the performance meant he had to take dopamine once at 4 p.m., and again at 8 p.m.“There might be moments when I feel like I’ve taken a bit too much,” Hodges said earlier that day, “but in the situation of playing, that’s way better than having taken too little.”In an email, Saunders said that Hodges still plays with intensity. “His recent performance of the piano concerto ‘to an utterance’ was brilliant, and I found it deeply expressive,” she wrote. She is planning to write him an ambitious new piece she described as “a big, long solo based on the concerto.”Seven other composers are currently at work on new piano concertos for Hodges. This spring, he recorded Betsy Jolas’s complete solo piano works and premiered a new piece by Christian Wolff, “Scraping Up Sand in the Bottom of the Sea.” Hodges also plans to record an album with works by Debussy and contemporary composers, similar to his double portrait of Beethoven and Birtwistle.On rare occasions, Hodges has felt he was treated differently because of his illness. One composer recently “looked straight at my hands as if they would be twisted or bleeding,” he said. But many more of his collaborators have been supportive, helping him adapt without condescension or pity.Hodges says that his goal, now, is to adjust his career “to ensure that I have the best chance to slow the progress of the disease and thus keep playing with any qualities I might have had before Parkinson’s more or less intact.”He knows that might not last forever. “If I should stop playing, then I hope that my friends tell me I should stop playing,” Hodges said. “But, at the moment, it’s working.” More

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      Seeing ‘L’Orfeo’ in Santa Fe

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      Among the company’s annual summer offerings, Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo,” from 1607 but newly reorchestrated and imaginatively staged, stands out.It’s a change so small, you might not even notice it. But the posters and playbills around the campus of Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico have given Monteverdi a makeover: Gone is the article from “L’Orfeo,” which is being styled this summer as simply “Orfeo.”Few are likely to, and shouldn’t be, bothered by a shift so innocuous. And you could say the same for how the work, premiered in 1607 and the oldest surviving opera still regularly performed, is being presented here: with a deferential new orchestration by Nico Muhly for modern instruments, and a myth-free yet no less magical staging by Yuval Sharon.This “Orfeo,” which premiered on July 29, was the last of Santa Fe Opera’s five productions to open during its annual summer season. A newcomer, having never been staged there before, it is also the highlight of the company’s current offerings, which I saw over the past week.I started with opening night of “Orfeo,” in which the baritone Luke Sutliff jumped in to perform the title role — heroic not just given the circumstances, but also because of his thoroughly assured interpretation and stage presence, and, most impressively, the ability on short notice to pull off the complicated movement of Sharon’s production. (The intended star, the tenor Rolando Villazón, had been injured during the final dress rehearsal but was back by the second show.)Audience members got a taste of Monteverdi’s score before many of them had taken their seats; at different corners of the Crosby Theater campus, in the tree-dappled desert hills outside Santa Fe, small brass ensembles sounded the opening Toccata of the opera, in a touch from the playbook of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival in Germany.But once the show began properly, Monteverdi’s music took shape anew in Muhly’s treatment. Not so noticeably, though; each performance of “L’Orfeo” involves choices about instrumentation and articulation, work that has long been the territory of historically informed performance specialists like John Eliot Gardiner. Here, though, Muhly has written an indisputably clear, easy-to-replicate version of the score for modern orchestras, with enough lushness to satisfy a large opera house in future productions.An injury kept Villazón out of the opening-night performance of “Orfeo,” but he was back for the second show.Curtis BrownMuhly’s version of the score is most remarkable for how unremarkable it seems on the surface. Often, it sounds like “L’Orfeo” as we know it — opera’s foundational tale, of Orpheus and Eurydice — with small adjustments like a string line moved to the winds and more deeply fleshed-out harmonies. Occasionally, though, Muhly adds a flourish and a touch of his own idiom: tremolos of shivering tension; glassy violins giving way to arpeggiated textures; dirgelike calls from low brasses; fluttering winds.He creates, in the end, a personal love letter to Monteverdi that relishes not just a musical conversation, but the making of music itself, which is in the spirit of both the piece and Sharon’s production.Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera and the founder of the enterprising company the Industry in Los Angeles, is the most imaginative opera director in the United States, one who works in a collaborative spirit, across disciplines, sometimes to build a world premiere from scratch. This “Orfeo,” though, joins his Bayreuth “Lohengrin” as one of his tamer productions; there’s no headline-making concept, like the four acts of “La Bohème” performed in reverse or “Götterdämmerung” reduced to a one-hour drive through a parking garage. But here, he achieves a complex, deceptive sleekness while teasing out a single, timeless idea from the tale.His production takes place on an AstroTurf-covered dome, a small, artificial hill among the natural, immense ones seen through the open back of the stage. At the start, a white bed fit for a sanitarium sits on top, occupied by someone visibly sick and dressed in white; it’s La Musica (the pure-voiced soprano Lauren Snouffer), who, after picking up a lyre, is suddenly animated with the potential of music. The stage is then populated with a chorus of singers, who are dressed as if presenting a capsule collection in oranges and magentas in Carlos J. Soto’s characteristically stylish costumes.Orfeo’s story unfolds as a celebration of music and its meaning, its uses in moments of happiness and sadness alike. After the protagonist’s journey to the Underworld — in Alex Schweder and Matthew Johnson’s design, the dome opens to reveal a dark, misty grotto animated by light projections — and after Euridice dies a second, permanent death, her voice (the soprano Amber Norelai) is heard through a gramophone that Orfeo holds closely. Who among us hasn’t done something similar, listening to a song we know will amplify our pain?There are comedic touches as well, and joyous appreciations of community and music in an Arcadian ur-society absent of ideology. During the second performance, on Wednesday, that spirit turned from exuberant to assertive as the theater’s surroundings rumbled with thunder, and as the sunset was obscured by brush-stroke streaks of rain in the distance.That night, as Villazón belatedly stepped into the role, he did so with noticeably altered, muted blocking, and his voice was as uncooperative as it has been in recent years. He remains a charismatic presence — funny, touching, magnetic — but his tenor can shift suddenly from smooth, with a warm vibrato, to raw, with a hard edge that doesn’t befit a character whose musical beauty moves the gatekeepers of the Underworld.The mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey’s performance was a high point of “Pelléas et Mélisande.”Curtis BrownThe Santa Fe Opera Orchestra — a group in nimble, lively and consistently excellent form throughout the week — took up “Orfeo” with brisk, dancing energy under Harry Bicket’s baton, and, promisingly, settled more into the score during the Wednesday performance.This season, Bicket is doing double duty, also leading Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” in an appropriately enigmatic yet frustratingly obtuse production by Netia Jones. Seen on Thursday, his conducting produced something like the opposite of “Orfeo”: an atmosphere that moved almost imperceptibly forward, with flashes of color and sensuality.In that production, the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey sang Mélisande with a weighty lower range and a mixture of chilliness and seeping passion. Another commanding stage presence — whether here, or earlier this season as Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera — she is emerging as a major artist of her generation.There were other vocal standouts elsewhere throughout the week. That “Pelléas” also included a frighteningly resonant Zachary Nelson as Golaud; his fellow baritone Huw Montague Rendall as Pelléas, often warm and achingly tender, strained only at the top of his role’s range; and the great mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who had the opposite trouble, plush but diminished at the bottom.Two singers in other productions were even more memorable: the bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee and the soprano Ailyn Pérez.Nicholas Brownlee’s Dutchman seemed to preview a promising Wagnerian future.Curtis BrownAs the title character in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” Brownlee — often working against a clumsy staging by David Alden, but supported throughout by the energetic, detail-oriented baton of Thomas Guggeis — projected agony and careworn bitterness throughout the theater, even as he was made, strangely, to sing lying down or on his side. (That was among many baffling directorial choices, including a “Spinning Chorus,” performed by Minion look-alikes in Oompa-Loompa choreography.) Brownlee’s enunciation was clear, his voice booming and blending well with the soprano Elza van den Heever’s mighty and ardent Senta. You could sense a fruitful Wagnerian future unfolding before him.And in “Rusalka,” Pérez has found in the title role a part that rewards the richness of her sound. David Pountney’s elegant production, which treated the “Little Mermaid”-like story as the metaphor it always has been, has her rarely leaving the stage, crossing paths with the likes of Raehann Bryce-Davis’s playfully vicious Jezibaba and Mary Elizabeth Williams’s ferociously alluring foreign princess. At times Pérez was athletic, singing the “Song to the Moon” while climbing suspended chairs as if they were a jungle gym, projecting her longing as she leaned back, holding onto the furniture by a single hand. Through it all, her phrasing remained shapely, controlled and actorly, erupting in agony or passion but just as quickly retreating to a quiet, floating soprano, while in the pit Lidiya Yankovskaya teased out the Romantic elements of Dvorak’s score.In Rusalka, the soprano Ailyn Pérez has found a role that rewards her rich sound.Curtis BrownInevitably in a densely packed series of performances, not everything lands. Santa Fe’s “Tosca,” with de Chirico-inspired sets by Ashley Martin-Davis, propelled with inevitability under John Fiore in the pit. But onstage, the baritone Reginald Smith Jr.’s Scarpia was a villain deprived of nuance; and while there was promise in the tenor Joshua Guerrero’s passionately Italianate Cavaradossi and the soprano Leah Hawkins’s sumptuous Tosca, a bit of vocal unwieldiness betrayed works in progress.Keith Warner’s production had a few novel touches — including a jump scare better seen live than described here — but is mostly a dressed-up version of the familiar tragedy. And he seemed aware of his lineage in the opera’s history as, in the final moments, Tosca shot herself while a doppelgänger, dressed in a costume redolent of Maria Callas’s famous red gown and tiara, walked slowly offstage.It’s a confusing, if unnecessary punctuation that isn’t set up by the staging. But Warner’s heart is in the right place: It is possible to present opera with reverence and a bit of fresh style at the same time. For an example, you need only look to “Orfeo.” More

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      How Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Conquered the World

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      The pop star’s record-breaking, career-spanning show has dominated the summer, commanding attention and whipping up demand at a level thought unachievable in a fragmented age.As Taylor Swift rolled into Los Angeles this week, the frenzy surrounding her record-breaking Eras Tour was already in high gear.Headlines gushed that she had given $100,000 bonuses to her crew. Politicians asked her to postpone her concerts in solidarity with striking hotel workers. Scalped tickets were going for $3,000 and up. And there were way, way too many friendship bracelets to count.These days, the center of an otherwise splintered music world can only be Taylor Swift.The pop superstar’s tour, which is now finishing its initial North American leg with six nights at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, has been a both a business and a cultural juggernaut. Swift’s catalog of generation-defining hits and canny marketing sense have helped her achieve a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna — a dominance that the entertainment business had largely accepted as impossible to replicate in the fragmented 21st century.“The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania,” said Billy Joel, who attended Swift’s show in Tampa, Fla., with his wife and young daughters.In a summer of tours by stars like Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Morgan Wallen and Drake, Swift’s stands apart, in numbers and in media noise. Although Swift, 33, and her promoters do not publicly report box-office figures, the trade publication Pollstar estimated that she has been selling about $14 million in tickets each night. By the end of the full world tour, which is booked with 146 stadium dates well into 2024, Swift’s sales could reach $1.4 billion or more — exceeding Elton John’s $939 million for his multiyear farewell tour, the current record-holder.Swift has now had more No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 over the course of her career than any other woman, surpassing Barbra Streisand. With the tour lifting Swift’s entire body of work, she has placed 10 albums on that chart this year and is the first living artist since the trumpeter and bandleader Herb Alpert in 1966 to have four titles in the Top 10 at the same time.“It’s a pretty amazing feat,” Alpert, 88, said in a phone interview. “With the way radio is these days, and the way music is distributed, with streaming, I didn’t think anyone in this era could do it.”But how did a concert tour become so much more: fodder for gossip columns, the subject of weather reports, a boon for friendship-bracelet beads — the unofficial currency of Swiftie fandom — and the reason nobody could get a hotel room in Cincinnati at the end of June?“She is the best C.E.O., and best chief marketing officer, in the history of music,” said Nathan Hubbard, a longtime music and ticketing executive who co-hosts a Swift podcast. “She is following people like Bono, Jay-Z and Madonna, who were acutely aware of their brands. But of all of them, Taylor is the first one to be natively online.”Swift on the opening night of her Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz., on March 17.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesSwifties have chronicled the stream of celebrity fans who have turned up each night: Julia Roberts, the New York Jets’ new quarterback Aaron Rodgers, even Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. But Swift has also made each show a news event by adding two “surprise songs,” often with headline-grabbing guests. On the July day that she put out a music video featuring Taylor Lautner, an ex-boyfriend, the actor backflipped across the stage in Kansas City, Mo., and paid Swift effusive tribute — “not just for the singer you are,” Lautner said, “but for the human you are.” The crowd registered its approval with an earsplitting roar.The Taylorpalooza extends to every level of the news media, which began the coverage cycle by chronicling Swift’s ticketing fiasco last November, when fans — and scalpers’ bots — crushed Ticketmaster’s systems, leading to a heated Senate Judiciary hearing. Since then, seemingly no nugget of Swift news has escaped coverage, from the stars in the stands to oddities like a Seattle concert that, according to one researcher, shook the ground with an intensity equivalent to a 2.3-magnitude earthquake.Music critics have portrayed the Eras Tour as showing Swift at the top of her game as a media-savvy, big-tent talent, a pop star with a knack for grand spectacle as well as the polished artistry of a classic songwriter.Shania Twain, the country-pop star whose career in some ways prefigured Swift’s, caught the Las Vegas stop of the Eras Tour, a 44-plus song production that goes as long as three and a half hours. She praised Swift’s “beautiful balance” of high-tech stagecraft and intimate performance segments. “I have to applaud her,” Twain said in a telephone interview. “As a performer, I know that work that goes into it.”The power of Swift’s fan army — and fear of crossing the star, or even appearing to — has kept nearly all of the press about the tour sunny. Though some fans (and parents) balked at the ticket prices and challenges of securing seats, most frustration was directed squarely at Ticketmaster, not Swift. After a few weeks of headlines romantically linking Swift with a frontman some fans considered to be problematic, reports spread in the celebrity pages that they had split. (Swift’s representatives declined to comment for this article.)For fans, the shows are a pilgrimage, and a rediscovery of the joys of mass gatherings. Flights are packed with Swifties, and travelers trade stories and compare outfits — drawn from looks associated with Swift “eras” — in stadium corridors and parking lots. In Kansas City, the comedian Nikki Glaser was attending her eighth show, a commitment that she estimated has cost her $25,000.“This year I decided not to freeze my eggs,” Glaser said. “I’m going to put that money toward the thing I love most in the world, which is Taylor Swift.”Swift’s fans buy tour merchandise outside the stadium before a show in New Jersey.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesBefore Eras, Swift hadn’t been on tour since 2018. And her catalog has grown by seven No. 1 albums since then, fueled in part by three rerecorded “Taylor’s Versions” of her first LPs — a project hailed by Swift’s fans as a crusade to regain control of her music, though it is also an act of revenge after the sale of Swift’s former record label, a move that, she said, “stripped me of my life’s work.”“Folklore” and “Evermore” expanded her palate into fantastical indie-folk and brought new collaborators into the fold: Aaron Dessner from the band the National and Justin Vernon, a.k.a. Bon Iver, rock-world figures who helped attract new listeners.The other major tour this year that is enticing fans to book transcontinental flights, and to show up costumed and in rapture, is also by a woman: Beyoncé, 41, whose Renaissance tour is a fantasia of disco and retrofuturism. Like Swift, she is also a trailblazing artist-entrepreneur, maintaining tight control over her career and fostering a rich connection with fans online. Together with Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a critique of the patriarchy told in hot pink, they are signs of powerful women ruling the discourse of pop culture.But in music, at least, the scale and success of Swift’s tour is without equal. Later this month, after completing 53 shows in the United States, she will kick off an international itinerary of at least 78 more before returning to North America next fall. Beyoncé’s full tour has 56 dates; Springsteen’s, 90. (Recently, Harry Styles wrapped a 173-date tour in arenas and stadiums, grossing about $590 million.)Outside Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, fans posed for selfies and shared their ticketing ordeals. Esmeralda Tinoco and Sami Cytron, 24-year-old former sorority sisters, said they had paid $645 for two seats. A stone’s throw away, Karlee Patrick and Emily DeGruson, both 18 and dressed as a pair in angel/devil costumes after a line in Swift’s “Cruel Summer,” sat “Taylorgating” at the edge of the parking lot; they said they had paid $100 for parking but couldn’t afford tickets.As Swift’s opening acts finished, the crowd rushed in. Glaser, the comedian, later said that of the eight shows she had been to, her favorites were the ones where she had brought her mother — and converted her to Swiftie fandom.“Everyone is in love with her,” Glaser said her mom told her after one show in Texas. “Now I get it.” More

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      Anna Netrebko Sues Met Opera After Losing Work Over Support of Putin

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      Seeking at least $360,000, the singer accused the storied opera house of discrimination, defamation and breach of contract. The company disputed her claims.The star Russian soprano Anna Netrebko filed a lawsuit on Friday against the Metropolitan Opera, seeking at least $360,000 in compensation for work she lost when the company parted ways with her after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Netrebko was fired by the Met last year after refusing to denounce Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom she had publicly supported in the years before the invasion. In the complaint, she accuses the Met of discriminating against her because she is Russian; of issuing “defamatory” statements about her in the press; and of breaching contracts by not paying her for some lost work.The Met disputed her claims. “Ms. Netrebko’s lawsuit has no merit,” the company said in a statement.Netrebko has in recent months taken aim at the Met, filing a complaint last year through the American Guild of Musical Artists, the union representing opera performers.In February, an arbitrator in that dispute ordered the Met to pay her more than $200,000 for 13 canceled performances because of a contractual agreement known as “pay or play,” which requires institutions to pay performers even if they later decide not to engage them. The Met had argued that Ms. Netrebko was not entitled to payment because of her refusal to comply with the company’s demand that she denounce Mr. Putin, which the company said had violated its conduct clause.Still, the arbitrator refused Ms. Netrebko’s request for an additional $400,000 in fees for engagements in coming seasons that had been discussed but not formally agreed to, including leading roles in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” and “Tosca,” as well as Verdi’s “Macbeth” and Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” Ms. Netrebko was earning the Met’s current fee for top artists of about $15,000 a performance.The complaint filed by Ms. Netrebko on Friday said that the Met still owed her most of those additional fees, as well as compensation for emotional distress and damage to her reputation. The complaint accuses the Met and its general manager, Peter Gelb, who has been critical of Ms. Netrebko in the news media, of leading a “defamatory crusade” against her.The suit notes that even after she publicly stated that she opposed the war, Mr. Gelb spoke with her on the phone and asked her to specifically denounce Mr. Putin. “Gelb indicated that if Netrebko issued such a statement, the Met would continue its relationship with her,” the suit said. “Netrebko responded that, as a Russian citizen, she could not make such a statement.”The complaint is the latest effort by Netrebko, a major star and box-office draw, to rehabilitate her image. Netrebko still has a busy international performing schedule, largely in Europe. But since the invasion, she has faced cancellations and protests elsewhere, including in the United States and parts of Asia.She has struggled to get beyond questions about her past support for Putin. She endorsed him for president in 2012, and has spoken glowingly about him over the years. And in 2014, when she donated to an opera house in Donetsk, a war-torn city in Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists, she was photographed holding a separatist flag.Since the invasion, Ms. Netrebko has sought to distance herself from Putin, saying they have only met a few times.Mr. Gelb has defended the Met’s decision to cut ties with Ms. Netrebko and other artists who have voiced support for Mr. Putin. “It’s more important than ever that our position does not change,” he said earlier this year, “until the war is won by Ukraine.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More

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      Leny Andrade, ‘First Lady of Brazilian Jazz,’ Dies at 80

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      With her soulful, cigarette-tinged contralto and emotive “bossa-jazz” stylings, she mesmerized audiences and critics alike.Leny Andrade, the Brazilian singer who earned an international following with her soulful fusion of samba, bossa nova and American jazz and whom Tony Bennett once called the Ella Fitzgerald of Brazil, died on July 24 in Rio de Janeiro. She was 80.Her death, in a hospital, from pneumonia, was confirmed in a statement by a Rio retirement home for artists where she was living. She had also been treated for Lewy body dementia.Often referred to as “the first lady of Brazilian jazz,” Ms. Andrade (pronounced ahn-DRAH-jay) rose from the clubs of Rio, where she performed as a teenager, to forge a six-decade career, recording more than 35 albums as a pioneer of what she came to call bossa-jazz.In 2007, Ms. Andrade won a Latin Grammy Award for “Ao Vivo,” a live album with the celebrated Brazilian pianist César Camargo Mariano.“Leny is one of the greatest improvisers in the world,” Mr. Bennett, who died last month, once said. “I love the way she sings. She is an original.”Singing largely in Portuguese, Ms. Andrade brought a richness and emotional depth to icily cool bossa nova tracks, pulse-quickening sambas and soulful ballads, which she infused with a world-weary sultriness.In a review of her American debut in 1983 at the Blue Note jazz club in New York, John S. Wilson of The New York Times praised the emotive power she brought to “Cantador,” a ballad in the intense Edith Piaf tradition. “Miss Andrade sings it in a darker, softer voice than Piaf’s,” he wrote, “with a dramatic effect that comes through even to a listener who doesn’t understand Portuguese.”Ms. Andrade’s career took off in the United States in 1993 after she moved to New York, where she became a popular draw, performing at Birdland and other clubs, sometimes with Mr. Bennett and Liza Minnelli in the audience. The following year, she played at Lincoln Center as well as the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.Her voice, a deep, woody contralto with a seen-it-all air, carried a hint of a rasp from her long love affair with cigarettes. The overall effect could be mesmerizing.“To describe Ms. Andrade as both the Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald of bossa nova only goes so far in evoking a performer whose voice seems to contain the body and soul of Brazil,” Stephen Holden wrote when reviewing a 2008 New York club performance in The Times.“You may think you know ‘The Girl From Ipanema,’” he continued, but “you haven’t really absorbed it until you’ve heard Ms. Andrade sing it in Portuguese; disgorge might be a better word than sing, since, like everything else she performs, it seems to well up from the center of the earth.”For Ms. Andrade, singing brought sustenance. “My soul is everything I can offer the public,” she said in a 2013 interview with the Brazilian music site Esquina Musical. “When I open my mouth, any pain goes away. I sing without fear. My friends and enemies embrace me.”“When I sing,” she added, “I embark on a magic carpet out of here. I travel to Mars.”Leny de Andrade Lima was born in Rio on Jan. 26, 1943. Her father, Luiz de Oliveira Lima, and mother, Ruth Couto de Andrade, divorced when Leny was young. She grew up in Méier, a neighborhood in the city’s North Zone, a hotbed of samba.Mr. Andrade’s debut album, from 1961, drew from a moody samba sound of an earlier era. RCA VictorAt the urging of her mother, Ms. Andrade studied classical piano and singing starting at age 6. She earned a scholarship to the Brazilian Conservatory of Music. Beethoven and Brahms, however, were not her destiny.She became entranced with bossa nova (“new wave” in Portuguese), which fused traditional Brazilian rhythms with American jazz, as it emerged from the beaches of Brazil in the late 1950s. She was also influenced by the samba stylings of the popular Brazilian singer Dolores Durán.“I showed my piano diploma to my mother,” she said in a 2013 interview on Brazilian television, and told her, “‘Forget about opera, classical music. I will sing popular music — because of Dolores Durán.’”Her professional career began at 15, performing at dances with the bandleader Perminio Goncalves, chaperoned by her stepfather, Gustavo Paulo da Silva, since she was still a minor.She later sang with the Sérgio Mendes Trio, a jazz combo, before Mr. Mendes took his detour to international pop stardom with his band Brasil 66. “He said he hated samba; he didn’t play it,” Ms. Andrade told Esquina Musical. “And I said the same about jazz. But we ended up giving in and mixing the two.”She came to embrace jazz and its improvisational wordless singing style known as scat. (In his 1983 Times review, Mr. Wilson praised her scatting “agility that approaches Ella Fitzgerald.”)In 1961, Ms. Andrade released her first album, “A Sensação,” for RCA, moodily drawing from the samba of an earlier era. She hit her stride two years later, fusing bossa nova with traditional jazz on “A Arte Maior de Leny Andrade,” on Polydor.She was married briefly when she was younger and never had children. Information about survivors was not immediately available.As a jazz singer, Ms. Andrade never enjoyed roaring commercial success, but that fact did not disturb her. “I don’t make music for the masses,” she told Esquina Musical. “They don’t have the ability to understand my work. Bad stuff is not in my repertoire.”Flávia Milhorance contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro More

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      A (Sad) Playlist for the 2023 New York Mets

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      Fifteen songs that tell the tale of a rough season.It’s impossible for Mr. Met to look sad, but trust us, he would at this point in the season if he could.Frank Franklin Ii/Associated PressDear listeners,This week, there has been joy neither in Mudville nor in Queens — home of the New York Mets, a team enjoying a catastrophically disappointing 2023 season.The Mets began the year with high hopes for a deep postseason run and with an even higher payroll (somewhere near $350 million before luxury tax payments, making them the most expensive baseball team in history). But after Tuesday’s trade deadline, at which point the Mets had a 50-55 win-loss record, the organization all but gave up on 2023, trading away most of their best pitchers and a few sluggers to boot, in exchange for a bunch of admittedly exciting young prospects who will nonetheless probably not blossom until at least (gulp) 2025. The remaining Mets responded by losing three games in a row to the Kansas City Royals, currently one of the worst teams in M.L.B., but also — a little more salt in the wound, please — the very team to which they lost the World Series in 2015.Suffice to say, I’ve not been listening to a lot of happy music the past few days.In his highly entertaining 2021 book “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets — The Best Worst Team in Sports,” the journalist Devin Gordon writes, “There is a difference between being bad and being gifted at losing, and this distinction holds the key to understanding the true magic of the New York Mets.” Yet again, the Mets have fulfilled that reputation and somehow found a novel way to fail, in the process inventing an entirely new flavor of pain to inflict upon its fan base. It’s honestly kind of impressive.As any librettist or opera composer knows, some tragedies are so grand that they must be expressed in music. And though I am but a humble newsletter writer, I know this, too. So here it is: a playlist for the 2023 Mets.You will not hear Timmy Trumpet (the man behind the triumphant entrance music for our closer, who was injured in freakish fashion in March) on this playlist. You will hear the Smiths, as the 2023 mood is closer to sumptuous anguish. You’ll also hear classics from the Who, David Bowie and Talking Heads, alongside newer songs from Palehound and the long-suffering Mets fans Yo La Tengo.You don’t need to root for the Mets, or even like baseball, to listen to this playlist. Actually, if you don’t, it will work as a primer to help you understand the complicated tale of woe that is the Mets’ 2023 season. But if it somehow compels you to devote yourself to the orange and blue, I offer you a hearty welcome. Misery loves company.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The Smiths: “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”Though it is possible to describe the psyche of a Mets fan in a playlist comprised entirely of Smiths songs — “Panic,” “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,” “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby” — the title of this jangly ditty from 1984 sums things up pretty succinctly. (Listen on YouTube)2. Peggy Lee: “Big Spender”When the billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen bought the Mets in 2020, he became the wealthiest owner in the M.L.B. Going into the 2023 season, he clearly wasn’t afraid to spend, or pay the luxury tax. As a result, he assembled the most expensive roster in baseball history. What could possibly go wrong? I’m sure Peggy Lee, in this snappy 1966 rendition of a showstopper from “Sweet Charity,” couldn’t possibly guess! (Listen on YouTube)3. The Magnetic Fields: “Come Back From San Francisco”“Come back from San Francisco, it can’t be all that pretty when all of New York City misses you,” Shirley Simms sings on this 1999 song by the Magnetic Fields — a sentiment shared by some New Yorkers earlier this season when former Mets and current Giants like Michael Conforto, J.D. Davis and Wilmer Flores all got off to hot starts just as the Mets’ bats started going cold. (It’s also a sentiment plenty of older New Yorkers still feel about the Giants organization itself.) (Listen on YouTube)4. The Big Bopper: “Chantilly Lace”At least Pete Alonso was hitting some very big bops at an astounding pace — 20 home runs by the end of May. As the Big Bopper would say, “Hello, baaaaby!” (Listen on YouTube)5. David Bowie: “Boys Keep Swinging”Indeed they did — whether or not they were making contact with the ball. If only they were having as much fun as Bowie on this 1979 glam-pop gem. (Listen on YouTube)6. The Who: “The Kids Are Alright”An undeniable bright spot for the 2023 team has been the offensive prowess of a group of very young rookies who earned the nickname “The Baby Mets”: the 23-year-old infielders Mark Vientos and Brett Baty; and the 21-year-old catcher Francisco Álvarez, who at press time had hit more home runs this year than any other catcher in baseball. The kids are all right! (Listen on YouTube)7. Palehound: “Eye on the Bat”“Suckers will all tell you to keep watching for the ball, but we know better than that,” Palehound’s El Kempner sings. “Keep your eye on the bat.” Good song from a recently released album I’ve been enjoying; bad advice for the New York Mets. (Listen on YouTube)8. SZA featuring Ty Dolla Sign: “Hit Different”I began to wish they would. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Everly Brothers: “June Is as Cold as December”Brrr. The Mets won just seven games and lost 19 in June — a month so disastrous that The Athletic’s Tim Britton wrote an article asking, “Did the Mets just complete their worst month in franchise history?” This being the Mets, though, he found plenty of others, writing, “Note that this is a non-exhaustive list. There are other very bad months that did not make the cut.” (Listen on YouTube)10. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles: “A Fork in the Road”Another silver lining, though, was the 30-year-old Japanese pitcher Kodai Senga — making his M.L.B. debut this season with the Mets — and his elusive signature pitch, the “ghost fork,” named for the way it suddenly disappears from the strike zone. (Listen on YouTube)11. Yo La Tengo: “Fallout”It wouldn’t be a Mets playlist without some Yo La Tengo. The long-running New Jersey indie-rock band is named after a great, if possibly apocryphal, story involving the former Mets Richie Ashburn and Elio Chacón, and this year the band’s Ira Kaplan threw out the first pitch at a Mets game. The title of its latest album, which features the fuzzy single “Fallout,” also expresses a sentiment that is relatable to many Mets fans: “This Stupid World.” (Listen on YouTube)12. Ace Frehley: “New York Groove”The Mets play this stomping, irresistibly catchy glam-rock tune — written by the British producer Russ Ballard, but popularized by the native New Yorker Ace Frehley — after every home game that they win. So for a hopeful moment in July, when the team kicked off the month with a six-game winning streak, it was a song that actually got some play. (Listen on YouTube)13. Talking Heads: “Burning Down the House”But it wasn’t enough. As the trade deadline neared, the team began selling off some of its most valuable assets: First, the closer David Robertson and the starting pitcher Max Scherzer. Then, at the trade deadline on Tuesday, they just started burning down the house. Baseball’s most expensive roster ever had officially gone bust. Here’s your ticket; pack your bags. (Listen on YouTube)14. George Strait: “All My Ex’s Live in Texas”And now ours do, too: Scherzer has joined Jacob deGrom on the Texas Rangers, while Justin Verlander has returned to his former team, the Houston Astros. George Strait, I now know how you felt when you recorded this 1987 hit. (Listen on YouTube)15. Hot Chocolate: “You Sexy Thing”And yet … at least technically, the season is not over. Rooting for the Mets means ya gotta believe in miracles. (Listen on YouTube)All the fans are true to the orange and blue,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“A (Sad) Playlist for the 2023 New York Mets” track listTrack 1: The Smiths, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”Track 2: Peggy Lee, “Big Spender”Track 3: The Magnetic Fields, “Come Back From San Francisco”Track 4: The Big Bopper, “Chantilly Lace”Track 5: David Bowie, “Boys Keep Swinging”Track 6: The Who, “The Kids Are Alright”Track 7: Palehound, “Eye on the Bat”Track 8: SZA featuring Ty Dolla Sign, “Hit Different”Track 9: The Everly Brothers, “June Is as Cold as December”Track 10: Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, “A Fork in the Road”Track 11: Yo La Tengo, “Fallout”Track 12: Ace Frehley, “New York Groove”Track 13: Talking Heads, “Burning Down the House”Track 14: George Strait, “All My Ex’s Live in Texas”Track 15: Hot Chocolate, “You Sexy Thing”Bonus tracksIf you are curious how I came to devote my life to the perpetual misery that is Mets fandom, you’re in luck — I wrote an essay on that very topic last year, for the briefly shuttered and soon-to-be-revived magazine Bookforum. Viva la Mets! Viva la Bookforum!Also, I mentioned Devin Gordon’s delightful Mets book, so I would be remiss if I did not also recommend Gordon’s equally delightful 2018 New York Times Magazine profile of the Mets announcers Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling, “the Magi of Mets Nation.”And if you’re looking for new music, this week’s Friday Playlist features tracks from Mitski, Wilco, Jorja Smith and many more. More