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      The Exquisite Fragility of Mark Andre’s Music

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      Andre’s family history is one of precarity and mutability. His works, vulnerable and intricate, aren’t so different.In 2007, Pierre Boulez was conducting a performance of Mark Andre’s “…auf…II” in Amsterdam when a phone rang. The interruption broke the spell of the score’s opening, in which stabbing harmonies activate a mysterious echo. Boulez stopped the orchestra, went backstage for a few minutes, then started the music again.Boulez’s response speaks to the exquisite fragility of the music by Andre, 60, who has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s most original composers. His pieces are like spider webs: Close attention reveals their intricate beauty, while a careless gesture can destroy their effect.His newest composition, a work for piano and electronics titled “…selig ist…,” will be premiered by Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany on Oct. 19. (The concert will also be livestreamed.) The piece lasts about 50 minutes and is ferociously difficult. It’s also full of sounds that can easily be obscured by a ringtone.Five or six years ago, Aimard, a contemporary music virtuoso, began pursuing a collaboration with Andre; this new work is their first world premiere together.“After having listened a lot to his music I thought, ‘This is the person I would like to dedicate some of my forces and time to,’” Aimard said in a phone interview. “Because it seemed to me that the profoundness of his creation, his deep spirituality, the extremely subtle acoustical world which he works with, and the high discipline in his handwork were what I was looking for at this moment.”The fragility of Andre’s music can be traced to his family’s background in Alsace, a region that changed hands between France and Germany many times.Robert Rieger for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Randy Newman Is at His Best When America Is at Its Worst

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      His movie songs are filled with memorable melodies; his own albums with unsavory characters. One of the most astute cultural observers is the subject of a new book.Around the summer of 1966, a song on the radio recorded by the Italian American pop crooner Julius La Rosa caught Bob Dylan’s ear: a forlorn, impressionistic ballad called “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” penned by a 22-year-old publishing company staff writer from Los Angeles named Randy Newman.“Randy’s song was so mysterious,” Dylan recalled. “I never heard a song like that before; it was so cynical.” Newman’s own rendition later stood out to him for “the sadness in Randy’s voice. Sadness and cynicism, it’s a strange combination but Randy always manages to pull it off.”Dylan’s testimonial is one of many in “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman,” by the former Los Angeles Times pop critic Robert Hilburn (out Oct. 22).“It’s an honor to have Dylan say something nice about me,” Newman said during a recent phone interview. Though he’s received plenty of accolades — including six Grammys, three Emmys and two Oscars, as well as induction into the Rock & Roll and Songwriters Hall of Fame — Newman, now 80, admitted, “what I really wanted was to have the respect from fellow workers in the field. That Bob or Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Linda Ronstadt, that those people liked what I did mattered to me — maybe an inordinate amount.”While Newman has never enjoyed the broad commercial success of his peers, his work has on occasion clicked with the culture. His somewhat controversial 1977 satire “Short People” was a bona fide hit that gave him his only gold album, “Little Criminals”; “I Love L.A.,” a wry celebration of his hometown from 1983, became an unlikely anthem for the city’s sports teams; the earnest “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from Pixar’s 1995 movie “Toy Story,” soundtracked millions of childhoods.In truth, far more people have heard the 20-plus film scores Newman has composed since the early ’80s than any of his singer-songwriter records. “It’s sort of a funny hand to be dealt,” he said.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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      Liam Payne, 31, Former One Direction Singer, Dies in Fall in Argentina

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      Payne, who was one of the group’s standout singers, fell from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, emergency services officials said.Liam Payne, who rose to fame as a singer and songwriter for the British group One Direction, one of the best-selling boy bands of all time, died after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires on Wednesday. He was 31.His death was confirmed by Alberto Crescenti, the director of emergency services in Buenos Aires. The circumstances of the fall were unclear.One Direction burst onto the scene in 2011 when the group’s debut single, “What Makes You Beautiful,” hit No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Five of its other songs reached the chart’s Top 10, including “Story of My Life,” “Drag Me Down” and “Live While We’re Young.”The group, which had 29 total hits on Billboard’s Hot 100, would go on to release five albums and become one of the definitive boy bands of the 2010s, largely by eschewing the sleek precision and polish of an earlier generation of pop vocal groups.One Direction announced in 2015 that it was taking a break from performing as an ensemble, and each of the artists has since invested most of their time in their solo careers. “It’s just a break 🙂 we’re not going anywhere !!,” Louis Tomlinson, one of the band’s members, posted on Twitter at the time. 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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      Ananda Lewis, Former MTV V.J., Says She Has Stage 4 Breast Cancer

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      Lewis, the host of the 1990s MTV show “Hot Zone,” tried to fight her illness without undergoing a double mastectomy. She says she is responding well after resuming treatment.The former MTV V.J. Ananda Lewis said in a CNN round-table discussion that was posted online on Tuesday that her breast cancer, which she first learned she had in 2019, metastasized last year and had reached Stage 4.In a phone interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Lewis, 51, said that she had since resumed treatment and was feeling much better. “I’ve turned it around really beautifully,” she said.Lewis first became recognizable in the 1990s as a host of “Teen Summit,” a long-running weekly live show on BET that aimed to speak to Black teenagers about current issues (Lewis interviewed Hillary Clinton, who was then the first lady, on the program in 1996). She went on to host “Hot Zone,” an MTV show in which she interviewed stars and gave style advice. The Times, in a 1999 profile, described her as one of MTV’s most popular stars and “the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl.”Stage 4 breast cancer means that the cancer cells have spread beyond the breast, often traveling to the bones, the lungs and the liver. It can be treated with tools like chemotherapy and hormone therapy, but it is considered incurable. Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the United States and a leading cause of death from cancer among women globally.In the round-table — with the CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam, Lewis’s best friend since they met at Howard University in the 1990s, and the CNN anchor Sara Sidner, who had a double mastectomy this year after learning that she had Stage 3 breast cancer — Lewis said that she had decided not to get a double mastectomy despite her doctors’ recommendation in early 2019, when she first discovered the lump and learned she had Stage 3 breast cancer.She sought conventional care after receiving the initial diagnosis, speaking to “the right and best oncologists, the breast surgeons,” she said on Wednesday. As she told Elam, “I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way.”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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      Leif Segerstam, Provocative Finnish Conductor and Composer, Dies at 80

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      He led his country’s principal orchestras and major orchestras elsewhere in Europe. He also mystified his countrymen with an unstoppable flow of symphonies.Leif Segerstam, a Finnish conductor and composer whose hundreds of symphonies were as mysterious as his pronouncements about them, died on Oct. 9 in Helsinki. He was 80.His son Jan said he died in a hospital after a brief bout of pneumonia.In a small country with a unique musical culture, Mr. Segerstam occupied a singular place: He was the “king of our country’s cultural industry,” the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat wrote after his death. He himself said he was “the Jesus of music,” explaining, “In the world of music I have truths that are just as valuable as the teachings of Jesus.”He led Finland’s principal orchestras as well as other major orchestras in Europe; he shaped his country’s world-leading crop of conductors; and he was an unequaled interpreter of its greatest musician, Jean Sibelius, bringing a composer’s creativity to his uncompromising, barren scores.“The conductor was at the summit of the art of rubato” — the practice of expanding and contracting rhythm — “which made absolutely exquisite the slightest melodic curve,” Pierre Gervasoni of Le Monde wrote in a review of Mr. Segerstam’s 1998 Paris performance of Sibelius works with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. That was typical of the way critics reacted to Mr. Segerstam’s instinctive accounts of Sibelius.“Music is in time, but you shouldn’t stop and find out, because then you lose the time, because time doesn’t exist,” Mr. Segerstam said, mysteriously, to the music journalist Bruce Duffie in 1997.Mr. Segerstam “is an alarming person to interview,” James Jolly, the editor in chief of Gramophone magazine, wrote in 2002. “He doesn’t speak in sentences or even paragraphs: instead his ‘thoughts’ come streaming out in torrential pages.”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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      Review: ‘Ainadamar’ Fills the Met Opera Stage With Flamenco

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      Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s opera, inspired by the life of Federico García Lorca, arrived at the Met with a dizzying blend of styles.It took nearly 20 years, but the music of Osvaldo Golijov has arrived at the Metropolitan Opera. And it’s not the work that he originally expected.In 2006, Peter Gelb, before taking over as the company’s general manager, announced that Golijov, celebrated at the time for his jubilantly multicultural hit “La Pasión Según San Marcos,” had been commissioned to write a new opera for the Met. The company later said it would be based on Euripides’ “Iphigenia in Aulis,” with a premiere set for the 2018-19 season.Then, in 2016, during a dry spell for the composer, who had developed a reputation for missed deadlines, the project was called off.There was another Golijov opera readily available for the Met to program, though: “Ainadamar,” a fantasia about the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It’s a seemingly sure bet, so frequently performed since its 2003 premiere that it has appeared in New York multiple times already.So Golijov finally got to take his bow on the house’s stage, with the opening of a new production of “Ainadamar” on Tuesday. A fluidly staged dream heavy on flamenco spectacle, it was assured in its movement, but not in its musical performance. After all these years, the Met still doesn’t appear quite ready for Golijov.The production, directed by Deborah Colker, has constant flamenco choreography by Colker and Antonio Najarro.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Eddie Van Halen Changed Rock History. Now His Brother Is Telling Their Story.

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      On Oct. 4, 2015, Van Halen performed at the Hollywood Bowl in what proved to be its last show, capping a decades-long run as one of rock’s most successful and influential acts. The amphitheater is about 30 minutes from the 800-square-foot house in Pasadena, Calif., where the Van Halen brothers — the drummer Alex and the guitarist Eddie — grew up. But the journey between those spots took the group all over the world, through the highest highs and lowest lows of rock ’n’ roll glory, excess and tragedy.Alex, 71, has learned to be grateful for every moment of it. During a video call one morning in September from his home in the Los Angeles area, he cited an old saying: “‘In the effort lies the reward.’” He was dressed casually in a blue button-down check shirt underneath a leather jacket, sunglasses on and dark hair brushed back. On an otherwise bare wall behind him hung a gold record for Van Halen’s 1978 self-titled debut album.“That’s exactly how Ed and I felt,” he said. “The ride was the reward. And it’s been a hell of a ride.”That trek — the first 30 or so years of it, at least — is chronicled in “Brothers,” a book that will be published on Oct. 22, which Alex was moved to write after losing Eddie, his younger sibling by roughly 20 months, to cancer in October 2020. He characterized the project, told with the New Yorker writer Ariel Levy, as “a painful experience.” But, he said, “you’ve got to go through the pain to get to the other part.”Alex and his brother were extremely close. “Every day, the first thing I’d do is call him,” he said. “We would talk, we would yell and scream at each other. But we were always supportive.”Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesAlex was a commanding presence onstage, especially in Van Halen’s early years (recall him bare chested, furiously bashing away behind a massive drum kit in the 1981 video for “Unchained”), but he was always more reserved with the press. He ceded the role of mouthpiece to the band’s exhibitionist singer, David Lee Roth, and his brother, who was routinely hailed as one of the greatest guitarists of his generation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Faces 6 Lawsuits From Lawyer With a Hotline

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      The Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee filed suits in New York with new allegations of rape and sexual assault from 1995 to 2021. Mr. Combs denied the accusations.The embattled music mogul Sean Combs is facing six more sexual assault lawsuits in New York, including one from a man who accused Mr. Combs of groping his genitals when he was 16, in what a team of lawyers say are the first filings from dozens of plaintiffs.The lawsuits, filed on Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, also accuse Mr. Combs of raping two men and two women and forcing another man to perform oral sex in allegations that span from 1995 to 2021. All of the claims were filed anonymously.The filings further intensify the legal troubles facing Mr. Combs, the longtime record executive and performer known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, as he awaits a trial for federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges in a Brooklyn jail. He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers said in a statement in response to the new lawsuits that “Mr. Combs has never sexually assaulted anyone — adult or minor, man or woman.”The new lawsuits were brought by a personal injury lawyer in Houston, Tony Buzbee, who has used Instagram and a widely publicized news conference to solicit clients. Mr. Buzbee detailed the scope of his work at the news conference this month, where he spoke in front of a backdrop displaying a large red hotline number that people with claims against Mr. Combs could call.“After the indictment of Sean Combs and the announcement that we were pursuing these claims, the floodgates opened,” Mr. Buzbee said at the news conference.In one of the lawsuits filed on Monday, a plaintiff recounts a 1998 encounter with Mr. Combs at one of the entertainer’s famous White Parties at his mansion in the Hamptons. The suit says the plaintiff, who was 16 at the time, bumped into Mr. Combs and shared his dreams of “becoming a star,” after which Mr. Combs told him that he needed to drop his pants. When the plaintiff complied, the suit says, Mr. Combs grabbed and squeezed his genitals.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