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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Will Be Sentenced in October

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      The music mogul was convicted last week on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, each carrying a maximum of 10 years in prison.Sean Combs will be sentenced on Oct. 3, a federal judge decided on Tuesday.Last week, a jury found Mr. Combs guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, charges that were related to hiring and arranging travel for male escorts to have sex with his girlfriends in voyeuristic encounters known as “freak-offs” and “hotel nights.” The music mogul was acquitted on the most serious counts, sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, after an eight-week trial.Mr. Combs faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, but it is unusual for federal judges to assign the maximum punishment. The time that Mr. Combs will have already served in jail, which will be one year at the time of sentencing, would be credited to the ultimate sentence.Prosecutors have said that based on their preliminary calculations, federal sentencing guidelines indicate a range of at least 51 to 63 months’ imprisonment, or four and a quarter to five and a quarter years. But the government could ask for more time. Sentencing guidelines are used to create a penalty range based on various factors, including the nature of the offense, specifics of the case and personal characteristics of the defendant, such as the person’s criminal history.Using the same guidelines, Mr. Combs’s defense team calculated a very different range: between 21 and 27 months, with the top of that range being just over two years.After the verdict last week, Judge Arun Subramanian, who oversaw the trial, denied Mr. Combs’s request for release on bail, citing the defense’s own admissions that its client had been responsible for domestic violence.Judge Subramanian scheduled the sentencing after the defense and the government were supposed to debate the logistics at an afternoon hearing. But the two sides came to an agreement on the date beforehand.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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      Listening Back to When Janet Jackson Was for Lovers

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      Hear six sensual songs by the pop great.Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty.Bonnie Schiffman/Getty ImagesDear listeners,As the senior staff editor for the Arts & Leisure section, I’m often lost in a big profile. The kind that makes you consider the arc of a career, its slopes, its peaks, and its inevitable chasms. And because so much of my life has been organized around music — I was 6 when I first bounced into the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music for voice and theory instruction — the contours of a pop life have always been particularly fascinating to me.There’s a Janet Jackson video that I’ve been thinking about a lot, one that captures her at a moment of metamorphosis. It opens on a warmly lit loft, where Jackson’s dancers, playing themselves, are playfully trying to coax her into handing over the cassette (it’s 1993!) that houses the lead single from her new album. After a false start, it begins. “That’s the Way Love Goes” sounds like sweaty bodies and basement parties, a song in the key of pleasure seeking. It was considered a sonic departure for an artist who, just shy of 27, had prized discipline, control.For the vérité-style video, directed by her partner at the time, René Elizondo Jr., Jackson re-emerged beaming: her skin coppertone, hair a cascade of crinkly waves (not a military cap in sight) — and emitting what I understand now as the aura of a woman who’s given herself permission. In an interview that year with The Los Angeles Times, she described her approach to making the album, titled simply, “Janet.”: “I finally just started writing down all my feelings about love,” she said, “making love, falling in love, falling out of love, everything.”And with that, she ushered in what I can only call the Pleasure Era. Here, my favorites — with a few flirtations from other moments in her catalog.It’s always a summer of love,RebeccaListen along while you read.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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      Aix Festival: How to Experience It From Afar

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      Many of the offerings at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France are broadcast, or they travel to other theaters. Here are some highlights.Every summer, opera moves from the city to the country. Stars pack their bags for idyllic destinations, and their most dedicated, deep-pocketed fans follow.It’s festival season, and perhaps the most interesting one is in Aix-en-Provence, France. At the Aix Festival, directors take risks on classics, and new works are unveiled in spots as old-fashioned as a Baroque theater and as unlikely as a monolithic stadium off the highway. Audience members come from around the world, often laid back in linens and sandals, expecting an operatic adventure worth traveling for.This year’s Aix Festival, which continues through July 21, has been somberly tinted by the death of its general director, Pierre Audi, in early May. He had commissioned two productions that premiered during the opening weekend: an intimate, charged reimagining of Britten’s “Billy Budd” by the director Ted Huffman and the composer Oliver Leith; and the world premiere of “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” a long but frequently beautiful collaboration among the composer Sivan Eldar, the director Peter Sellars, the artist Julie Mehretu and the author Lauren Groff.It’s too soon to know whether those shows will travel and take root. But other festival productions already have plans to be broadcast and streamed online, or even to be revived at other opera houses. Below are ways to experience them for yourself. (Some media may be restricted in certain countries.)‘Don Giovanni’Andrè Schuen, above, and Clive Bayley in “Don Giovanni” at the Grand Théâtre de Provence.Monika RittershausThe festival opened on July 4 with a new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” directed by Robert Icke in his opera debut and conducted by Simon Rattle, leading the lush Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Icke is known for his intelligent, liberal adaptations of theater classics, and he was similarly bold, if sometimes overflowing with ideas, in taking on one of the most difficult operas in the canon.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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      ‘Diddy Parties’ Became a Meme. The Combs Case Was About Something Else.

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      The sweep of graphic lawsuits accusing Sean Combs of sex abuse led to a sense that his criminal case might examine celebrity debauchery in the music industry. It did not.Before the music mogul Sean Combs went to trial on sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges this year, an avalanche of lawsuits had already cast him as a brazen, A-list supervillain, capable of almost anything.In dozens of cases, many filed anonymously, Mr. Combs was accused of sexual assaults across decades, some of them said to have involved druggings at well-attended, star-studded parties and industry events. The accusers included men and women, and more than a dozen said they were minors at the time they were assaulted.Mr. Combs’s lawyers have vehemently denied the abuses alleged in the suits, most of which are still working their way through the civil court system. But the sheer volume of complaints fueled speculation that the criminal prosecution of Mr. Combs could expose a shadowy underworld of celebrity depravity, and perhaps the enabling behavior of music industry executives.The trial of Mr. Combs, 55, turned out to be something else entirely.While filled with graphic details of explicit sex, the case that ended last week centered on a narrow, private sphere of Mr. Combs’s life. The sexual encounters at issue took place on small stages: isolated hotel rooms and homes. These were not orgies where Mr. Combs interacted openly with celebrities and music honchos, but discrete encounters with long-term girlfriends and typically a single male escort.That these sessions involved voyeuristic sex that stretched over hours, even days, while Mr. Combs watched, masturbated and filmed, was without question salacious. But given the length of the investigation, the intensity of the federal raids on his mansions and the government’s interview of a man who said he had seen sex tapes involving minors (such tapes never materialized and the accusation did not lead to charges), the scope of what prosecutors were pursuing seemed broader than the resulting indictment.“I think we were all expecting something very different,” said Mara S. Campo, a journalist who covered the case against Mr. Combs and had worked previously as an anchor at Revolt, his former television network. “I think that he’s been helped tremendously by the expectation that this was going to be very different than what it turned out to be. This didn’t look like what most people think of when they think of sex trafficking.”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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      Peter Sellars Is Still Living His Life Through Art

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      The director, one of the most influential in opera, is staging new productions in New York, France and Austria this summer.Peter Sellars watched the rehearsal and wept in the dark.It was a recent afternoon at Purchase College, north of New York City, and an ensemble was going over a soft yet cataclysmic passage in Matthew Aucoin’s “Music for New Bodies.”A group of singers was almost wailing the word “down,” over and over, as an instrumental undertow seemed to stretch time into a yawning void. The music made plain the terror in the text — Jorie Graham’s poetry of cancer treatments and climate change — and the cheeks of Sellars, the production’s director and one of the most revered figures in the performing arts, grew wet with tears.Among his collaborators, Sellars is cherished for this openness with his feelings. He wraps anyone and everyone in a bear hug. He releases sudden honks of laughter. He cries.“He allows himself to be impacted,” said the soprano Julia Bullock, “and releases his emotions very easily.”“Music for New Bodies” arrives at David Geffen Hall on Thursday as part of the American Modern Opera Company’s summer residency at Lincoln Center. Sellars’s production is in the pared-down, nearly ritualistic style for which he’s become known. With barely any set or props, the singers and instrumentalists are the focus, onstage together under moody lighting, in shifting formations that have the charged drama of Baroque paintings.“I made the staging, but staging is too fancy a word,” he said in an interview. “It’s just — you can see the music.”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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      Valery Gergiev, Shunned in West Over Putin Support, Will Conduct in Italy

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      Valery Gergiev, an ally of Vladimir V. Putin, is set to conduct in Western Europe for the first time since institutions there cut ties over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Valery Gergiev, the star Russian maestro who has been shunned in the West because of his close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, will appear this month at a festival in Italy, his first engagement in Western Europe since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Mr. Gergiev, a staunch ally of Mr. Putin who has helped promote the president’s policies, is set to conduct on July 27 at the Royal Palace of Caserta, a historic site north of Naples, the Un’Estate da RE festival announced last week. He will lead an orchestra from Salerno, Italy, in a program featuring performers from the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, which Mr. Gergiev leads.The announcement drew protests from Italian politicians and activists, who expressed concern that Mr. Gergiev was being allowed to perform again in the West. Mr. Gergiev, whose extensive international career once made him one of the busiest maestros in the world, has been declared unwelcome in the United States and Europe since the Russian invasion.Mr. Gergiev did not respond to a request for comment.The decision to engage Mr. Gergiev also drew criticism because the festival is bankrolled by the European Union. Its funding flows, via Italy’s national government, to a company owned by the Campania region, where the festival takes place. The company funds several cultural events throughout the region, including Un’Estate da RE.Pina Picierno, a left-leaning Italian politician who serves as a vice president of the European Parliament, said that it was “unacceptable that European funds are being used to finance the performance of a Kremlin supporter.” In a post on X, she called on the festival and on regional officials “to take immediate action to prevent Valery Gergiev’s participation and ensure that taxpayers’ money does not end up in the pockets of a supporter of a criminal regime.”Vincenzo De Luca, the center-left president of the Campania region, defended the festival’s decision to engage Mr. Gergiev in a statement. He said the invitation showed that “dialogue between people can grow and the values of human solidarity can develop.”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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      Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath Play Final Shows in Birmingham, England

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      Heavy metal fans crossed continents to converge on Birmingham, England, and throw devil horns in honor of the Prince of Darkness and Black Sabbath.They came by the thousands.They dressed in black, with T-shirts featuring crucifixes, dragons and demons.They gathered on Saturday in Birmingham, England, to pay their respects to a figure of almost religious significance in the heavy metal world: Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness.Since Osbourne and his bandmates Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, formed Black Sabbath in Birmingham in 1968, they have been regarded as the fathers of heavy metal.On Saturday, Osbourne, 76, was at the center of “Back to the Beginning,” a 10-hour concert at the Villa Park soccer stadium that he had said would culminate in Black Sabbath’s final stage appearance.Chris Hopkins from Birmingham showing his Black Sabbath tribute tattoo.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesOzzy Osbourne masks.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesAnshul Doshi, center with beard, who lives in England, and an entourage that traveled from India for the concert.Ellie Smith 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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      The Hunt for a 316-Year-Old Stradivarius Stolen in the Fog of War

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      The violin by the famed Italian luthier was plundered at the end of World War II and presumed lost or destroyed. Now experts say they believe it has resurfaced.As Germany devolved into chaos at the end of World War II, a rare violin from the famed shop of the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari was plundered from a bank safe in Berlin.The instrument, crafted in 1709 during the golden age of violin-making, had been deposited there years earlier by the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family as Nazi persecution put assets owned by Jews in jeopardy.For decades after the war, the family searched to no avail for the violin, known as the Mendelssohn, placing ads in magazines and filing reports with the German authorities. The violin, valued at millions of dollars, was presumed lost or destroyed.The Mendelssohn Stradivarius is shown here in black-and-white photos before it was stolen. It bears striking similarities to an instrument that passed through a New York auction house in 2000, shown here in color.Carla Shapreau; Mendelssohn-Bohnke Papers; TarisioNow, the Mendelssohn may have resurfaced. An eagle-eyed cultural property scholar, Carla Shapreau, recently came across photos from a 2018 exhibition of Stradivarius instruments in Tokyo. She spotted a violin that bore striking similarities to the Mendelssohn, though it has a different name — Stella — and creation date — 1707 instead of 1709.“My jaw dropped,” said Shapreau, a senior fellow with the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who had been searching for the instrument for more than 15 years.

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