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      ‘Summer of Soul’ Review: In 1969 Harlem, a Music Festival Stuns

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      Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival from Questlove.There’s no shortage of system shocks in “Summer of Soul.” This is a concert movie that basically opens with a 19-year-old, pre-imperial-era Stevie Wonder getting behind a drum kit and whomping away — sitting, standing, kicking, possessed. It’s a movie that nears its end with Nina Simone doing “Backlash Blues” in a boxing match with the keys of her piano, her hair indistinguishable from the conical art piece affixed to her head.The movie’s got Sly and the Family Stone and B.B. King and Ray Barretto and Gladys Knight & the Pips, in top, electric form. But no jolt compares to what happens in the middle of this thing, which is simply — though far from merely — footage from the 1969 edition of the Harlem Cultural Festival, footage that Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, has rescued and assembled into nearly two-hours of outrageous poignancy. It’s all been cooking before this midway moment. But it’s once you’re there, engulfed in it, that you trust Thompson’s strategy.Sometimes these archival-footage documentaries don’t know what they’ve got. The footage has been found, but the movie’s been lost. Too much cutting away from the good stuff, too much talking over images that can speak just fine for themselves, never knowing — in concert films — how to use a crowd. The haphazard discovery blots out all the delight. Not here. Here, the discovery becomes the delight. Nothing feels haphazard.After the energetic asides about Mayor John Lindsay’s earnest support of the festival and Maxwell House’s sponsorship; after an exuberant montage of the outfits and stage patter of the festival’s charismatic and, it must be said, dashing mastermind, Tony Lawrence; after a poignant, illuminating passage on the overlooked, much fretted over quintet the Fifth Dimension, Thompson plunks us down in the middle of a meaty gospel passage.The Edwin Hawkins Singers kick it off with their rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” which at the time was a massive hit. Then the Staple Singers — Pops and his daughters Cleotha, Yvonne and Mavis — come on and dress “Help Me Jesus” in rockabilly robes. Not far behind is the pulpit dervish Clara Walker, whose exhortative way with a tune doubles as furnace and fan.Now, these performances took place over six summer Sundays. So I don’t know what any particular day’s official, chronological lineup was, but Thompson and his editor, Joshua L. Pearson, have done some mighty hefty truncation. Minutes after Walker and her Gospel Redeemers, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson appears, looking as beatifically beatnik as he’d ever get. Backing him is the Breadbasket Orchestra and Choir, and he begins to tell the many Harlemites densely packed before him that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last words were to the Breadbasket’s leader, Ben Branch. King told him that he wanted him to play the gospel pillar “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” And here now to grant that wish is Mahalia Jackson, who many a time sang it at King’s request.Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson, performing at the festival, which took place over six summer Sundays.Searchlight PicturesIt’s important to note, that during this passage, Mavis Staples and Reverend Jackson have also been narrating the scene from the present. Speaking today, using her front-porch husk, Staples remembers that Mahalia Jackson, her idol, leaned over and asked for her accompaniment. Mavis Staples was around 30; Mahalia Jackson was in her late 50s and wasn’t feeling well.Staples goes first, alone and a-blast. Jackson follows her with equal force and in defiance of whatever had been ailing her. Then together — Jackson refulgent in a fuchsia gown with a gold diamond emblazoned below her bosom; Staples in something short, lacy, belted and white — they embark on the single most astounding duet I’ve ever heard, seen or felt. They share the microphone. They pass it between them. Howling, moaning, wailing, hopping, but well within the song’s generous contours and, somehow, in control of themselves. My tears weren’t jerked as I watched. The ducts simply gave way, and the mask I wore at the theater where I sat was eventually covered in runny, viscous salt.They’re singing for the festival’s attendees. They’re mourning all of the death — of leaders, of followers, of troops and civilians. They are, if you’re willing to see it this way, lamenting what is obviously a generational transition from one phase of Black political expression to another, from resolve to anger, from the grandiloquence of Jackson’s pile of hair to Staples’s blunter Afro. They are singing this cherished classic of bereavement in order to mourn the present and the past. Listening to them now, in the summer of 2021, plumb earth and scrape sky, you weep, not only for the raw beauty of their voices but because it feels as if these two instruments of God were also mourning the future.I don’t remember how long this performance lasts. It doesn’t really even have an ending, per se. It just simply concludes, with each woman heading back to Reverend Jackson, into the band. But when it’s over you don’t know what to do — well, besides never forget it. It’s an extraordinary event not just of musical history. It’s a mind-blowing moment of American history. And for five decades, the footage of it apparently just sat in a basement, waiting for someone like Thompson to give it its due.The whole movie is dues-giving. It’s true that nothing matches the high of Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples. Yet nothing that surrounds them feels puny or like an afterthought. Thompson has an assortment of people watch footage from the festival — attendees who were kids and teenagers at the time, performers who were there, folks like Sheila E., who learned her craft from some of these artists. And I was almost as devastated by the sight of Marilyn McCoo’s putting her hands to her face as she watches her younger self with the rest of the Fifth Dimension, recounting how in-between they felt as Black artists who Black people didn’t always think were Black enough. Their sound was light and round and reliant upon strings and harmonies that were commercial for 1969 but not cool. In this film, among Simone and Max Roach and Hugh Masekela, the Fifth Dimension don’t at all seem like outsiders. They seem like family.Throughout this thing, Thompson is dropping explanatory information and montages that are crosscut with more information. A passage about the national climate of ’69, for instance, is mixed in with the Chambers Brothers’ festival performance. And you’re sitting there in awe at how the film hasn’t lost you. It’s got its own rhythm. The images, the music, the news, the reminiscences, the commentary often come at you at once. And with another director what you’d be left with is noise, with mess. This is certainly where Thompson’s being a bandleader — a band-leading drummer; a band-leading drummer who D.J.s — matters. The onslaught operates differently here. The chaos is an idea.On one hand, this is just cinema. On the other, there’s something about the way that the editing keeps time with the music, the way the talking is enhancing what’s onstage rather than upstaging it. In many of these passages, facts, gyration, jive and comedy are cut across one another yet in equilibrium. So, yeah: cinema, obviously. But also something that feels rarer: syncopation.This festival took place the same summer that Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. The movie deftly accounts for the dissonance between the two events. It’s the answer to the brief, shrewd passage in Damien Chazelle’s “First Man” that intercuts the landing with Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.” These two movies would make a searing double feature of the same moment in American progress, on the ground and up in space. Of course, it’s hard not to leave this movie fully aware that, at that point, in 1969, with the country convulsed by war, racism and Richard Nixon, the power of those artists assembled in New York right then makes a firm case that Harlem was the moon.But the movie’s sense of politics isn’t so despondent. Thompson winds things down with Sly and the Family Stone doing “Higher.” That band was male and female, Black and white — weird, rubbery, ecstatic, yet tight, hailing from no appreciable tradition, inventing one instead. It’s been more than half a century, and I still don’t know where these cats came from. They simply seem sent from an American future that no one has to mourn.Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)Rated PG-13 (some cursing and lustiness, lots of spirit catching). Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Diego Cortez, a Scene Shaper in Art and Music, Dies at 74

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      In ’70s and ’80s New York, he elevated Jean-Michel Basquiat in a huge show he curated, helped found the Mudd Club and worked with Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson.Diego Cortez, an influential figure in New York City’s Downtown art and music scenes who in 1981 curated a massive exhibition featuring dozens of artists that brought the 20-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat to public renown, died on Monday in Burlington, N.C. He was 74.The cause was kidney failure, his sister, Kathy Hudson, said. He died in hospice care at her house but had been living nearby in Saxapahaw.Mr. Cortez seemed to be everywhere in SoHo, Tribeca and beyond in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He was a founder of the Mudd Club, a gritty, boundary-pushing nightclub that opened in 1978. He performed with Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker; directed music videos for Blondie and the Talking Heads; mounted shows of drawings and photographs by the rock singer-songwriter Patti Smith; and wrote “Private Elvis,” a book with photographs of Presley’s time in the Army that Mr. Cortez found in West Germany.Then came the “New York/New Wave” show in 1981. Held at the cutting-edge P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS 1) in Long Island City, Queens, the exhibition demonstrated Mr. Cortez’s eclectic knowledge of the visual and musical worlds that he’d been immersed in since he moved to New York City.He recruited more than 100 artists for the show, among them Ms. Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, David Byrne, William Burroughs, Futura 2000, Ann Magnuson, Fab 5 Freddy and Basquiat, whom he had met on the dance floor of the Mudd Club.“It was huge — literally 600 to 700 works of art that took three weeks to install, using two installation crews,” Alana Heiss, the founder of P.S. 1, said by phone. “He was very persuasive: we started with one group of galleries on the first floor and ended up on two floors.”“Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” she said.Curt Hoppe, a photorealist painter whose work was in the exhibition, recalled: “He brought uptown and downtown together, graffiti and downtown artists, and he hung it in an unusual way, splattering everything on the walls. It was a riveting show.”He added, “Diego was the epitome of cool.”Mr. Cortez recruited more than 100 artists for “New York/New Wave,” a 1981 show at what is now the exhibition space MoMA PS 1 in Queens. The show brought wide renown to Jean-Michel Basquiat in particular.MoMA PS1 ArchivesIn a maximalist show that Mr. Cortez packed with existing and future stars, Basquiat was introduced to a wider world. Known first for his graffiti art, he had morphed into a painter who incorporated images of angular people and symbols with words and phrases. The show, for which Basquiat created about 20 new works, brought him to the attention of dealers. By the time he died in 1988 at 27, he was a superstar.“What makes this work is the intensity of the line,” Mr. Cortez said in 2017 when the Basquiat portion of “New York/New Wave” was partly restaged at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. “Jean-Michel was really more of a drawer. It keeps that innocent aspect, that childish aspect that’s important, because it’s slightly not adult.”Mr. Cortez remained linked to Basquiat long after the P.S. 1 exhibition. He curated a few more shows of his work; advised his estate and served on its authentication committee; acted as a consultant to Julian Schnabel when Mr. Schnabel made the film “Basquiat” (1996); and played a bit part as what the credits called a “fist-fighter at the Mudd Club” in “Downtown 81,” another film about Basquiat, from 2001.Mr. Cortez stood before a painting of him by the photorealist painter Curt Hoppe. “Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” a colleague said.Curt HoppeJames Allan Curtis was born on Sept. 30, 1946 in Geneva, Ill., and grew up nearby in Wheaton. His father, Allan, was a warehouse manager for a steel company, and his mother, Jean (Ham) Curtis, was a manicurist.After graduating from Illinois State University with a bachelor’s degree, he earned a master’s degree in 1973 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied film, video and performance art. His teachers included the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and the video artist Nam June Paik.He changed his name to Diego Cortez before moving to New York City in 1973, adopting it as an artistic pseudonym and as a reflection of the Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago where he had lived.Once in New York, he worked as a studio assistant to the conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim and then to the video and performance artist Vito Acconci. Over the next few years, as he became further enmeshed in the Downtown music and art worlds, he held a variety of jobs, including one as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. The job inspired Ms. Anderson in 1977 to release “Time to Go (For Diego),” a song that tells how Mr. Cortez, working the late shift, would tell people when it was time to leave:Or, as he put it, snap them out of their … art trances.People who had been standing in front of one thing for hours.He would jump in front of them and snap his fingers.And he’d say, “Time to go.”Mr. Cortez’s career after “New York/New Wave” was multifaceted, but he never organized another enormous exhibition like that one. He was an occasional agent and curator; collaborated on projects with his friend Brian Eno, the innovative musician and producer; and served as an art adviser to the Luciano Benetton and Frederik Roos collections. He composed an album, “Traumdetung” (2014), a mix of music and his snoring. And at one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to start a museum in Puerto Rico.Laurie Anderson and Mr. Cortez at a benefit in New York City in 2013. She was inspired to base a song on one of his early jobs in New York, as a museum security guard.Cindy Ord/Getty Images“His main goal was to to support artists by having collectors buy their work or to get their work into museums,” said his sister Ms. Hudson, who organized exhibitions with her brother at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, where she worked.In addition to her, Mr. Cortez is survived by another sister, Carol Baum, and a brother, Daniel Curtis.Patti Smith, in a phone interview, said she first got to know Mr. Cortez in the 1970s. He later urged her to resume working on her visual art, which she had largely stopped pursuing during a long hiatus from public life. “He was a bridge to helping me get my feet back on the ground,” she said.He helped curate a show of her drawings and photos at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2002 and an exhibition of her photos in 2010 at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where he was the curator of photography at the time.“He didn’t like to stand in other people’s light,” Ms. Smith said. “He wanted Basquiat to stand on his own. He wanted me to stand on my own at my exhibition in New Orleans. He was really interested in seeing people he thought had promise flower.” More

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      A Requiem, Derailed by the Pandemic, Arrives When It’s Needed Most

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      Courtney Bryan’s Requiem, premiering Thursday after its original date was canceled last year, now follows a time of loss and upheaval.You’ve probably heard a story like this before. Courtney Bryan’s Requiem was set to premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in late March 2020. In a time of incalculable loss, her music became part of another kind of casualty: the sounds that vanished from stages around the world.Like many premieres originally planned for the past year, Bryan’s Requiem, written for the vocal quartet Quince Ensemble and members of the Chicago Symphony, was stranded in limbo. But through the orchestra’s turn to online programming and a season-ending series organized by Missy Mazzoli, its composer in residence, the piece was given a new date this week, when the latest episode of CSO Sessions lands on the streaming platform CSOtv.Maybe it’s actually more fitting that the Requiem be released now, as the United States emerges from its worst days of the pandemic — over 600,000 deaths later — and the country celebrates its first federally recognized Juneteenth, a year after the emotional, nationwide peak of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd.“I think about the loss in my own life, but I know that a lot of people have had a lot of losses during this time, due to Covid and other situations,” Bryan said in a recent interview. “So I’m really happy that this is the actual premiere.”Bryan, who is based in and from New Orleans, is a composer and performer who deals in collaboration, with an open ear to traditions like jazz and gospel — and, occasionally, to topics around racial justice like Black Lives Matter. In “Sanctum” (2015), she wove live orchestral playing in with sounds including the voices of demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo. Her oratorio “Yet Unheard” (2016) commemorated the life of Sandra Bland.Edwin Outwater leads the Quince Ensemble and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the premiere performance of Bryan’s Requiem, now streaming.Todd RosenbergHer Requiem was meant to be more abstract — haunted by contemporary tragedies, perhaps, but not explicitly tied to any one in particular. It draws from a broad range of inspirations, including death rituals from the Anglican Church, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” Neoshamanism’s death rite known as the “great death spiral” and New Orleans jazz funerals, as well as text from the Bible and the traditional Catholic Mass.Its five movements — Bryan associates that number with life — begin with a gentle, a cappella harmony built from elemental “mmm” sounds before each of the four voices of the Quince singers begins to follow a unique line, with detours into half-sung Sprechstimme and percussive sibilance. The other instruments don’t enter until about seven and a half minutes in, when the clarinet and brasses offer a chorale-like interlude, mournful and dignified.The Requiem is primarily a showcase for the Quince singers. They follow that instrumental passage with repetitions of the word “listen,” in different ways: The score instructs one to exclaim, and the others to plead, chant on pitch and whisper. A bass drum resounds, signaling the start of a dirge that includes a duet of simultaneous yet lonely melodies from the clarinet and trombone. By the end, after sadly beautiful word painting with the “Kyrie eleison” text and a clarinet solo of upward runs, Bryan arrives at a finale that is less restful and resolved than a traditional Requiem’s, but more cyclical, closing with the “mmm” vocalise that started the piece.Bryan talked more about the work and its inspirations in the interview. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Was this commission specifically for a Requiem, or was that your choice?It actually goes back to when I met Quince. I was really taken not only with their music and their voices, but also how they talked about music and the things that they cared about. We bonded, and then a year after that — about four years ago — we were talking, and I told them I would like to write an a cappella Requiem.I grew up in an Anglican church and was deciding between the Catholic Mass and the Anglican Mass, and thinking of writing a Requiem, but in my own style. As I got into it, I started reading about different dying rituals from traditions around the world, how people approach funerals and the celebration of life. Then I took a pause, because it got really big. There was a lot to learn, and it was changing the way I approached it — and because we didn’t have a specific deadline, I stepped down.Later, I heard from Missy Mazzoli about a commission at the Chicago Symphony, and I knew that Quince was on the program. So I changed it. The first section is still a cappella, but then I added instruments.Even with more musicians, it’s still far from the scale of something like Verdi’s Requiem.It was already going to be chamber size. But yeah, I ended up going kind of minimal with the way I used the instruments. I checked out classic Requiems, definitely Verdi’s and Mozart’s, and the feeling I got — or even just from reading the Catholic Mass — was this feeling of rising up against death. It feels like there’s a battle or a triumph, and I found that I was most interested in thinking about death and the cyclical nature of life and death, and more, kind of, an acceptance. So all my text was Christian, but it’s my perspective on the Requiem.I was about to say, there’s a tension at the end of your piece, between triumphant language like “Death will be no more” and music that’s more unsettled and mysterious.It felt like a natural ending because it’s a life cycle; it wasn’t a triumph or an arrival point. And with the text, “The first things have passed away,” I thought it was something that was not an ending or a beginning.Performed by the Quince Ensemble with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Edwin Outwater, conductor.When you were exploring traditions of mourning, what did you find yourself attracted to, conceptually and artistically?The one that hit home the most is just thinking about New Orleans — the idea of the celebration of life and the jazz funeral. There’s the walking of the casket from the church to the burial ground, but there’s a whole ceremony in a jazz funeral that starts with the dirge, and then it goes up-tempo to a celebration of life. So that was a major influence on the instruments that I chose: the brass band or the New Orleans ensemble. I wasn’t trying to replicate the style, necessarily, but there are little symbolic things.What do you make of the context of this Requiem’s premiere, as opposed to spring last year?I know some commissions come in response to this historic thing, and you have your own take, but this was something that I just wanted to do. That’s why it’s interesting that it took its own time and that the actual premiere is after this really profound time of loss. I find these kinds of things mysterious, how they happen. So, I hear it differently. It sort of came out of some of the work I was already doing, where I was writing music about police brutality. I wouldn’t say this piece is about that; it was a chance for me to go in deeper into these ideas about life and death.Quince asked, in the middle of the rougher parts of the pandemic, how I would feel if they just recorded the first, a cappella part and put it online for people — just something to share. The folks at the Chicago Symphony were very supportive of that, so we did. It felt good to have something like that to offer, and I feel the same way as it is being offered now. I hope it will be healing to people.RequiemStreaming at cso.org/tv. More

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      Au tribunal, Britney Spears demande la levée de sa tutelle.

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      Lors d’une déclaration publique exceptionnelle au tribunal de Los Angeles, la chanteuse a prononcé un discours passionné sur la tutelle qui contrôle sa vie et demandé qu’elle soit levée.La vie et les finances de Britney Spears sont sous tutelle depuis 2008. Mercredi, au tribunal, elle a déclaré vouloir mettre fin à cet état de fait.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThe New York Times traduit en français une sélection de ses meilleurs articles. Retrouvez-les ici.Britney Spears a déclaré mercredi à une juge de Los Angeles qu’elle a été droguée, obligée de travailler contre son gré et empêchée de retirer son dispositif de contraception au cours des 13 dernières années, et a plaidé auprès du tribunal qu’il mette fin au contrôle légal de sa vie par son père.“J’étais dans le déni. J’étais en état de choc. Je suis traumatisée”, a dit Britney Spears, 39 ans, dans une déclaration émouvante de 23 minutes diffusée par téléphone dans la salle d’audience et, comme elle l’a demandé, au public. “Je veux juste qu’on me rende ma vie”.C’était la première fois que le monde entendait Britney Spears évoquer en détail ses difficultés avec la tutelle accordée en 2008 à son père, James P. Spears, qui, inquiet pour la santé mentale et potentielle toxicomanie de sa fille, avait demandé au tribunal à exercer une autorité légale sur sa fille adulte.Britney Spears a plaidé pour que la tutelle prenne fin sans qu’elle “ait à être évaluée”. “Je ne devrais pas être sous tutelle alors que je suis capable de travailler. Les lois doivent changer”, a-t-elle insisté. “Je considère vraiment cette tutelle abusive. Je n’ai pas le sentiment de pouvoir pleinement vivre ma vie.”Le conflit qui oppose l’une des plus grandes pop stars mondiale à son père est une longue saga qui a vu naître le mouvement mondial ‘Free Britney’ parmi ses fans et d’autres célébrités.À l’extérieur de la salle d’audience, une foule d’environ 120 sympathisants venus soutenir la chanteuse s’est tue pour écouter sa voix sur leurs téléphones.Ce rebondissement est intervenu après qu’en avril l’avocat commis d’office de Britney Spears, Samuel D. Ingham III, a déposé une requête, à sa demande, afin qu’elle soit autorisée — en procédure accélérée — à s’adresser directement à la juge. D’après des documents judiciaires confidentiels obtenus récemment par le New York Times, Mme Spears avait soulevé dès 2014 des problèmes relatifs au rôle de son père dans la tutelle, et avait demandé sa levée à plusieurs reprises, bien que M. Ingham n’ait pas demandé à le faire.“Ce que j’ai vécu me fait honte et me déprime, et c’est la principale raison pour laquelle je n’en parlais pas ouvertement “, a indiqué Britney Spears. “Je pensais que personne ne me croirait.” Elle a ajouté qu’elle ne savait pas qu’elle pouvait demander la fin de la tutelle. “Je suis navrée de mon ignorance”, a-t-elle dit, “mais je ne le savais pas”.La chanteuse s’exprimait à partir de notes préparées à l’avance, parlant si vite et de façon si passionnée que la juge a dû plusieurs fois lui demander de ralentir pour les besoins de son greffier.“Je vous dis la vérité là, OK ?” a-t-elle dit . “Je ne suis pas heureuse. Je n’arrive pas à dormir. Je suis tellement en colère, c’est du délire.”Les fans de Britney Spears devant le palais de justice de Los Angeles mercredi en prévision de l’audience de la star.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesLa chanteuse vit en Californie sous une double tutelle — couvrant à la fois sa personne et sa fortune — depuis 2008, date à laquelle son père, inquiet de sa santé mentale et de son éventuelle toxicomanie, avait saisi le tribunal pour obtenir l’autorité sur sa fille.M. Spears, 68 ans, supervise actuellement la fortune de près de 60 millions de dollars de Britney Spears, aux côtés d’une société de gestion de patrimoine professionnelle qu’elle a sollicitée; depuis 2019, un administrateur professionnel agréé prend en charge les soins personnels de Britney Spears sur une base temporaire toujours en cours.D’après des représentants de M. Spears et de la tutelle, il était nécessaire de protéger Britney Spears, et elle pouvait demander la fin de la tutelle quand elle le souhaitait.Mais la star a dit qu’elle s’est sentie contrainte de s’adresser de nouveau à la juge chargée de l’affaire, Brenda Penny, après avoir récemment pris position contre sa mise sous tutelle lors d’une audience à huis clos en mai 2019. “Je ne pense pas avoir été entendue à quelque niveau que ce soit la dernière fois que je suis venue au tribunal”, a-t-elle lancé avant de résumer ses précédentes remarques, affirmant notamment qu’elle avait été forcée en 2019 de partir en tournée, de subir des évaluations psychiatriques et de prendre des médicaments. “Ceux qui m’ont fait ça, on ne devrait pas les laisser partir si facilement”, a-t-elle asséné.Elle a raconté qu’après avoir donné son avis pendant des répétitions en vue d’une résidence à Las Vegas, annulée par la suite, on l’a contrainte à subir des évaluations médicales et une cure de désintoxication. Quand elle s’est opposée à un bout de chorégraphie, “c’était comme si j’avais posé une énorme bombe quelque part”, a-t-elle décrit, ajoutant: “Je ne suis pas là pour être l’esclave de qui que ce soit. Je peux dire non à un pas de danse”.“J’ai besoin de votre aide”, a-t-elle déclaré à la juge. “Je ne veux pas qu’on m’asseye dans une pièce pendant des heures par jour comme ils l’ont fait. Ils n’ont fait qu’empirer les choses pour moi.”Plusieurs fois, Britney Spears a fait remarquer qu’elle était en mesure de “faire vivre tant de personnes et de rémunérer tant de personnes”, alors qu’elle ne contrôlait pas ses propres finances. “Je suis excellente dans ce que je fais”, a-t-elle affirmé. “Et je permets à ces gens d’avoir le contrôle sur ce que je fais, Madame, et ça suffit. Ça n’a aucun sens.”Cela fait plusieurs années que les fans et les commentateurs s’interrogent sur le fait que Britney Spears réponde encore aux critères d’une mise sous tutelle, celle-ci étant typiquement un dernier recours pour des personnes qui ne peuvent pas s’occuper d’elles-mêmes, y compris celles souffrant de handicaps graves ou de démence. Jusqu’à récemment, la chanteuse a continué à se produire et à rapporter des millions de dollars dans le cadre de cet accord.Robbyn de la Fuente et ses enfants attendent l’audition de Britney Spears devant le tribunal de Los Angeles mercredi.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesMercredi, à l’extérieur du tribunal du centre-ville de Los Angeles, des dizaines de fervents partisans de la chanteuse ralliés sous la bannière #FreeBritney s’étaient rassemblés devant un fond rose fluo pour chanter et prononcer des discours dénonçant l’injustice de sa situation. Certains fans disaient avoir fait le voyage depuis Las Vegas et Détroit. Les représentants des médias étant encore plus nombreux, la foule avait gonflé jusqu’à occuper tout un pâté de maisons.Des participants plus âgés s’étaient également joints aux fans de la chanteuse, voyant dans le cas Britney Spears l’occasion d’attirer l’attention sur un système de tutelle en mal de réforme. “Quand on a entendu parler de ce groupe de jeunes animés d’une conscience sociale, on y a vu une opportunité d’éduquer les Américains”, explique Susan Cobianchi, 61 ans, qui a rejoint le contingent #FreeBritney au début de l’année, après le décès de sa mère dont la tutelle les avait tenus éloignées dans ses derniers jours.En 2016, Britney Spears a fait savoir à un enquêteur judiciaire chargé de son dossier qu’elle souhaitait que la tutelle prenne fin le plus rapidement possible, selon les documents signalés par le New York Times. “Elle a précisé qu’elle avait le sentiment que la mise sous tutelle était devenue un outil d’oppression et de contrôle à son encontre”, a écrit l’enquêteur. “Elle ‘en a marre qu’on profite d’elle’ et elle dit que c’est elle qui travaille et gagne son argent mais qu’elle paie tous ceux qui l’entourent”.À l’époque, l’enquêteur, qui est chargé de fournir des évaluations régulières au juge, a conclu que la mise sous tutelle restait dans le meilleur intérêt de la star en raison de la complexité de ses finances, de sa vulnérabilité aux influences néfastes et de ses problèmes de drogue “intermittents”. Mais le rapport préconisait également “un passage vers l’indépendance et la fin à terme de la mise sous tutelle”.Mercredi, la chanteuse a invoqué l’autorité de son père, le qualifiant de “celui qui approuve tout cela”, et a décrit comment lui et son équipe de direction l’ont intimidée et punie. “Ils méritent d’être en prison”, a-t-elle déclaré. Elle a également mentionné vouloir poursuivre sa famille en justice.Après ces remarques, Vivian Lee Thoreen, une des avocates de M. Spears, a demandé une suspension d’audience puis lu une courte déclaration au nom de son client : “Il est désolé de voir sa fille souffrir et éprouver tant de douleur”, a-t-elle lu. “M. Spears aime sa fille, et elle lui manque beaucoup”.Réunis devant le tribunal, Junior Olivas et d’autres fans de Britney Spears réagissent aux déclarations de la star au sujet de sa mise sous tutelle.Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesM. Ingham, qui a indiqué au début de l’audience qu’il ignorait ce que Mme Spears allait dire, semblait tout aussi stupéfait. Il a dit qu’il servait au gré de la cour, et qu’il se retirerait comme représentant de Britney Spears si on le lui demandait.“Étant donné qu’elle a fait les remarques qu’elle a pu faire en public aujourd’hui, elle estime qu’il serait souhaitable que les audiences se tiennent à huis-clos à l’avenir”, a déclaré M. Ingham. Une autre audience avait déjà été programmée pour le mois de juillet, mais la suite exacte des événements n’est pas encore claire.Si le parcours juridique à venir de la chanteuse risque d’être compliqué, les souhaits qu’elle a exprimés sont plus simples. Elle voudrait pouvoir se faire coiffer et se faire faire les ongles librement, a-t-elle dit, et pouvoir rendre visite à des amis qui vivent à “huit minutes de chez elle”.Elle préfère mettre sa foi en Dieu, a-t-elle dit, mais elle n’est pas opposée à un traitement à condition qu’il reste confidentiel. “Je sais que j’ai besoin d’un peu de thérapie”, a-t-elle admis avec un petit rire.Mais la mise sous tutelle “me fait beaucoup plus de mal que de bien”, a-t-elle ajouté. “Je mérite d’avoir une vie.”Mme Spears a raconté qu’on l’avait même empêchée d’aller chez le médecin faire retirer son stérilet, sa méthode de contraception : “Cette soi-disant équipe ne me laisse pas aller chez le médecin pour le retirer parce qu’ils ne veulent pas que j’aie d’enfants”, s’est-elle emportée.“Je veux pouvoir me marier et avoir un bébé”, a plaidé la chanteuse. “On m’a dit que là, mise sous tutelle, je ne suis pas en mesure de me marier et d’avoir un bébé”.Un peu plus tôt, Mme Spears avait déclaré qu’elle était “finie”. “Tout ce que je veux, c’est disposer de mon argent, que tout cela se termine et que je puisse faire un tour avec mon petit ami dans sa voiture”, a-t-elle déclaré, agrémentant son souhait d’un gros mot.Caryn Ganz et Liz Day ont contribué au reportage depuis New York. Lauren Herstik et Samantha Stark y ont contribué depuis Los Angeles.Regarder “Framing Britney Spears” (en anglais)Notre documentaire sur Britney Spears et sa bataille judiciaire avec son père pour le contrôle de sa fortune est gratuit sur notre site pour les abonnés du New York Times aux États-Unis. Regardez-le maintenant.Watch The New York Times documentary about Britney Spears and her court battle with her father over control of her career and her fortune. The full video is streaming on Hulu and free on our site for Times subscribers in the United States.Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times More

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      Mariah Carey Urges Britney Spears to 'Stay Strong' on Twitter

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      As Britney Spears made an anguished speech in court about the control exerted over her life for years, fans, observers and fellow pop stars responded with shock to the details that trickled out from the hearing in Los Angeles, sending messages of support and solidarity.In the hearing, Ms. Spears said she believed that the conservatorship — a legal arrangement that controls her personal life and finances — was “abusive” and that she had not been able to live a full life. Midway through Wednesday’s hearing, after Ms. Spears had finished her prepared testimony, the singer Mariah Carey urged her to “stay strong.”We love you Britney!!! Stay strong ❤️❤️❤️— Mariah Carey (@MariahCarey) June 23, 2021
      Devoted fans on social media who have long suspected that Ms. Spears was not happy with the arrangement commended Ms. Spears for speaking up and reacted with disgust to parts of her account.Ms. Spears also received supportive words on social media from the singers Brandy, Tinashe and Liz Phair, who wrote that declaring a woman “mad” to gain control of her assets was the “oldest trick in the playbook of the patriarchy.” The singer Halsey wrote on Twitter that she admired Ms. Spears’s courage in speaking up and hoped that she would be freed from the “abusive system.” More

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      Britney Spears Told Court She Wanted Her IUD Removed

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      One of the most explosive details in Britney Spears’s testimony on Wednesday came when she said that the people who control her affairs had refused to allow her to get her IUD removed so that she could try to have a third child.“I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” Ms. Spears said. “I was told right now in the conservatorship I am not able to get married or have a baby.”She told the court that she wanted to remove the birth control device “so I could start trying to have another baby, but this so-called team won’t let me go to the doctor to take it out because they don’t want me to have children, any more children.”Ms. Spears has two teenage sons with her ex-husband Kevin Federline. Her current boyfriend, Sam Asghari, had spoken publicly in opposition to Ms. Spears’s arrangement even when she remained relatively silent. Before the hearing on Wednesday, he posted a photo to Instagram of him wearing a shirt with the phrase #FreeBritney.Alexis McGill Johnson, president and chief executive of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, weighed in on Twitter, calling Ms. Spears’s account “reproductive coercion.” More

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      Gianna Rolandi, Spirited Soprano With a Radiant Voice, Dies at 68

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      Ms. Rolandi, an acclaimed Vixen and Lucia, made her mark at the New York City Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.Gianna Rolandi, an American soprano who brought effortless coloratura technique, bright sound and a vibrant stage presence to diverse roles over a 20-year international career, died on Sunday in Chicago. She was 68.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Ms. Rolandi had earlier been the director of the company’s Ryan Opera Center, a training program. No cause was specified.Her husband was the renowned British conductor Andrew Davis, who will step down on June 30 after nearly 21 years as music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera.Ms. Rolandi’s auspicious 1975 debut at the New York City Opera, as Olympia in Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann,” came when she was 23 and just out of the conservatory. She took over the role on short notice when the scheduled soprano withdrew. (Three days later she made what was to have been her official debut, as Zerbinetta in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”)She quickly won attention for the agility and radiance of her singing — and for, when it was called for, a beguiling sassiness. Beverly Sills, City Opera’s greatest star, became a crucial mentor to Ms. Rolandi in the 1980s, when Ms. Sills retired from singing to become the company’s general director.Along with career guidance, Ms. Sills gave Ms. Rolandi insight into roles she herself had performed to acclaim, among them the title role in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani” and Cleopatra in Handel’s “Giulio Cesare.”Reviewing her feisty performance as Zerbinetta with the company in 1982, The New York Times’s Donal Henahan wrote that “in Gianna Rolandi the City Opera had a Zerbinetta capable of creating pandemonium in any opera house anywhere.”Her “deft and virtually unflawed handing of her big, florid aria, one of opera’s most feared obstacle courses for coloratura soprano,” he added, “brought the performance to a halt for as extended an ovation as this reviewer has heard at either of our opera houses this season.”Ms. Rolandi starred in two notable “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts of City Opera productions: “Lucia di Lammermoor” in 1982, and, the next year, the title role in Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” an enchanting folk-tale opera centering on a community of forest animals and a few humans.Ms. Rolandi in the title role in the 1981 City Opera production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.” Beth Bergman“The Cunning Little Vixen” was largely unfamiliar to American audiences when City Opera introduced its colorful production in 1981. It was performed in an English translation of the Czech libretto, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and directed by Frank Corsaro, with sets and costumes realized from designs by Maurice Sendak.Ms. Rolandi was cast as the bushy-tailed, impish Vixen. It was “one of Ms. Rolandi’s finest roles to date,” the critic Thor Eckert Jr. wrote in The Christian Science Monitor, adding that she acted “with feline grace and an occasional touch of crudity just right for the role.”Her Metropolitan Opera debut came as Sophie in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” in 1979. But despite some acclaimed performances at that house, including the title role of the Nightingale in Stravinsky’s “Le Rossignol” in 1984 and Zerbinetta in 1984-85 (with Jessye Norman as Ariadne), she made just 17 appearances with the Met over six years.Even while appearing with major houses in America and Europe, Ms. Rolandi was content to call City Opera her base.“I feel like I’ve grown up here,” she said in a 1982 interview with The Times. The company “is a blessing for me,” she added. “You get exposure and you don’t have to leave home.”Carol Jane Rolandi was born on Aug. 16, 1952, in Manhattan. Her mother, Jane Frazier, from Winston-Salem, N.C., was a successful soprano who met Dr. Enrico Rolandi, an Italian obstetrician and gynecologist, while performing in Italy. They married and settled in New York.In 1955, when Ms. Rolandi was not yet 3, her father died in an automobile accident. Her mother moved with her and her brother, Walter, to the South, began teaching, and had a 30-year career as a professor of voice at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., where Ms. Rolandi grew up.Though drawn early to the violin, Ms. Rolandi kept listening to opera recordings and was increasingly captivated by singing. She studied both violin and voice at the Brevard Music Center, a prestigious summer music institute and festival in North Carolina. She continued her studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.Her City Opera debut came shortly after her graduation from Curtis. She went on to sing major roles in more than 30 operas with the company, including the American premiere of the Israeli composer Josef Tal’s “Ashmedai” in 1976 and the world premiere of Dominick Argento’s “Miss Havisham’s Fire” in 1979.Overall, though, she was not drawn to contemporary opera, as she acknowledged in a 1993 interview with Bruce Duffie, later broadcast on the Chicago radio station WNIB. It’s crucial for composers to “make the vocal part singable so you can make a line,” she said, and she did not like pieces that were “all over the place.”“The old guys had it right,” she said: “a nice line.”Ms. Rolandi and her husband, the conductor Andrew Davis, in 2005. The couple moved to Chicago when Mr. Davis became music director and principal conductor of the Lyric Opera there.Cheri EisenbergAfter an earlier marriage to Howard Hensel, a tenor (who appeared with City Opera) and actor, Ms. Rolandi met Mr. Davis in 1984 when she sang Zerbinetta at the Met, a production he was conducting. “We didn’t hit it off particularly well then,” she recalled in a 2006 interview with The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.They later met again at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. “This time it was different,” she said in that interview, “and the fireworks started to happen.” They married in 1989 and lived for some years in England.In addition to her husband, Ms. Rolandi is survived by their son, Ed Frazier Davis, a composer, baritone and conductor, and her brother.Ms. Rolandi retired from the stage in 1994 and focused on teaching. She and her husband moved to Chicago after Mr. Davis’s tenure with the Lyric Opera began in 2000. The next year she was appointed director of vocal studies at the company’s opera center; in 2006 she was promoted to director of the program, a position she held until 2013. Among the notable singers who worked with her in the program were Nicole Cabell, Quinn Kelsey, Stacey Tappan, Erin Wall and Roger Honeywell.Ms. Rolandi always cited the mentoring she received from Beverly Sills as her main inspiration for wanting to nurture young singers. Ms. Sills was “my teacher, my coach, my psychiatrist and finally my friend,” she told the critic Heidi Waleson in an interview for “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias,” Ms. Waleson’s 2018 book about City Opera.She was, Ms. Rolandi said, “my biggest cheerleader and fiercest critic.” More

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      Musical Chairs? Why Swapping Seats Could Reduce Orchestra Aerosols.

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      Moving super-spreading instruments, like the trumpet, closer to air vents could limit the aerosol buildup on stage, according to a new study.If musical instruments were people, trumpets would be super spreaders. When a trumpeter blows into the mouthpiece, tiny respiratory droplets, known as aerosols, travel out of the musician’s mouth, whiz through the brass tubing and spray into the air.During a deadly pandemic, when a musician might unwittingly be exhaling an infectious virus, that poses a potential problem for orchestras. And the trumpet is not the only musical health hazard.“Wind instruments are like machines to aerosolize respiratory droplets,” said Tony Saad, a chemical engineer and expert in computational fluid dynamics at the University of Utah.A simple but radical change — rearranging the musicians — could significantly reduce the aerosol buildup on stage, Dr. Saad and his colleagues reported in a new study, which was published in Science Advances on Wednesday.The work began last summer, when the Utah Symphony began to wonder whether, and how, they could return to performing safely.“They were looking for people that could provide insight into mitigation strategies that people would have some faith in,” said James Sutherland, a chemical engineer at the University of Utah and a co-author of the study.Comparison of aerosol concentrations, both instantaneous and averaged, for the baseline scenario and for the proposed mitigation strategy.Hedworth et alThe researchers created a detailed computer model of the symphony’s concert hall, noting the location of every air vent and the rate of air flow through the HVAC system.Then they mapped the typical position of each musician. The Utah Symphony, like most modern orchestras, positioned its musicians in a standard pattern, with the string instruments at the front of the stage, followed by several rows of woodwinds and brass instruments — the flutes and oboes, then the bassoons and clarinets, and then the trumpets and French horns. The trombones and the percussion section were positioned at the very back of the stage.To model the spread of aerosols during a concert, they incorporated recent research led by Jiarong Hong, a mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota. Working with the Minnesota Orchestra, Dr. Hong and his colleagues had measured the concentration and size of aerosol particles emitted by a variety of different wind instruments. (Among their findings: The trumpet, bass trombone and oboe posed the highest risk.)With these parameters in place, Dr. Saad and Dr. Sutherland used what are known as computational fluid dynamics simulations to model how the air, and aerosols, would flow through the Utah concert hall when all the musicians were playing.The simulation revealed complex patterns of airflow. In general, the air flowed down from the air supply vents in the ceiling to the air return vents in the floor at the back of the stage. But two distinct vortices, at the front and the back of the stage, also formed, they found. “You see these large regions that are recirculating like a big tornado,” Dr. Saad said.Aerosols can get caught in these vortices, swirling around and around the stage and building up over time.The trumpets, which emitted large, concentrated aerosol clouds, posed a particular problem. As the instruments’ aerosol plumes traveled toward the air vents at the back of the stage, they passed directly through the percussionists’ breathing zone.“We saw this and said, ‘OK, this is a big problem, we’ve got to solve this,’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And given the insight we had into how the flow was moving, we said, ‘Well, let’s move some of these instruments around.’”They knew the idea might be controversial; orchestras have generally been arranged the same way for decades, for reasons that include both acoustics and tradition. “We asked them when we started the project, ‘What constraints do we have to work with? Can we move people?’” Dr. Sutherland said. “And they said, ‘You do whatever you think you can to mitigate risk.’”A visualization of the proposed seating arrangement for the orchestra. Colors indicate the speed at which the respiratory aerosols are being emitted at (red is high, blue is low) and size indicates the amount of aerosols emitted per second.Hedworth et alThey moved the trumpets to the very back of the stage, right next to the air-return vents. Then they shifted the other wind instruments from the middle of the stage, moving them either closer to the back air vents or to the stage doors, which they suggested opening.These moves, the team hoped, would allow the aerosols to flow directly out of the concert hall, without passing through the breathing zones of other musicians or getting caught in an onstage vortex. “You want the smoker to sit close to the window,” Dr. Saad said. “That’s exactly what we did here.”Finally, they moved the instruments that do not generate aerosols at all — the piano and the percussion section — to the center of the stage. Together, these tweaks reduced the average aerosol concentration in the musicians’ breathing zones a hundredfold, the researchers calculated.Although the precise air flow patterns will be different in every venue, the general principles should hold everywhere, the team said. Orchestras can reduce the risk of aerosol spread by positioning the highest risk instruments near open doors and air return vents. (Orchestras that cannot do their own computer modeling could put a fog machine onstage and track how the fog flows, the researchers suggested.)Dr. Hong, who was not involved in the Utah study, praised the modeling work. “Simulating the flow inside an orchestra hall is not easy,” he said. “They did beautiful work in terms of characterizing flow.”But he questioned whether moving musicians was really a practical solution. “We work with musicians closely, and they don’t like to be rearranged,” he said. (He did note, however, that “for a student band, I think it’s perfectly fine.”)Instead, he proposed a different, albeit equally unconventional, solution: Masks, for the instruments. In a recent study, he found that covering the bell of a trumpet with a single layer of acoustic fabric could reduce particle emissions by about 60 percent without compromising sound quality.The Utah Symphony, for its part, proved open to rethinking the seating. And when it took the stage last fall, it did so with the stage doors open and the wind instruments at the rear.“That was a huge challenge for the musicians,” said Steven Brosvik, the president and chief executive of the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera. “But they all dove into it, and said, ‘Let’s go, let’s give it a try.’”It took a few weeks for the musicians to get comfortable with the new arrangement, and they plan to return to their traditional seating configuration this fall, Mr. Brosvik said. But the simulations gave the musicians peace of mind and allowed them to get back onstage, he said: “For us, it was life changing.”The researchers were pleased with how willing the musicians were to embrace an unusual solution, although their findings may have hit some instrumentalists harder than others. As Dr. Sutherland said, “We had to apologize to the trumpets in advance.” More