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      Maria Tipo, Italian Pianist Who Beguiled Critics, Dies at 93

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      Admired by fellow musicians like Arthur Rubinstein as well as by the critics, she created what came to be known as an Italian school of piano playing.Maria Tipo, a connoisseur’s pianist whose flawless technique and songlike sonorities earned her the admiration of fellow musicians and critics, though she was less well known to the public, died on Feb. 10 at her home in Florence, Italy. She was 93.Her death was announced by the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, where she taught for more than 20 years before her retirement in 2009.Ms. Tipo’s career began in spectacular fashion, with triumphs in several major European competitions, a strong endorsement from the piano titan Arthur Rubinstein, and exhausting tours of the United States throughout the 1950s. But then she largely faded from public view, apart from occasionally releasing recordings, which usually drew high praise from music critics and a brief return to touring in the 1990s.From the 1960s on, she devoted herself mostly to teaching. She once explained to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that the loneliness of concert life had worn her down: “There is the concert, yes, but it only lasts a couple of hours, and then you are alone with yourself again.”Her fellow star pianists cherished her. Martha Argerich considered Ms. Tipo one of the greats and sent her Argentine compatriot Nelson Goerner for lessons. Hundreds of students passed through Ms. Tipo’s courses at conservatories in Bolzano, Florence, Geneva and Fiesole, and she created what critics described as an Italian school of piano playing. Teaching, she told the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera in 2016, was “like a duty, to stay close to the young as they develop.”Ms. Tipo in 1987. She created a renaissance for the neglected piano sonatas of the early-19th-century Anglo-Italian virtuoso Muzio Clementi and was also known for her recording of Ferruccio Busoni’s piano transcriptions of Bach organ works.Jacques Sarrat/Sygma, via Getty ImagesWe 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 Four New Sex Abuse Lawsuits, Filed in One Day

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      The suits cite the Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, which opened a look-back window for alleged assaults and is expiring soon.Four new sex abuse lawsuits have been filed against Sean Combs, including one from a woman who says she was assaulted while a contestant on a VH1 reality show in which people vied to be hired as the hip-hop mogul’s personal assistant.The new cases, which were filed on Thursday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, join the dozens of civil lawsuits that have been filed against Mr. Combs since Casandra Ventura, his former girlfriend, made bombshell allegations against him in November 2023. Ms. Ventura’s suit was quickly settled, though at least 50 civil suits have followed hers with various accusations of sexual misconduct or violence. He has denied the allegations.In September, Mr. Combs was also indicted on federal charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has denied those accusations and pleaded not guilty, and his trial is scheduled to begin in May.In one of the new suits, Kendra Haffoney says that she was raped by Mr. Combs around 2008, while she was a contestant on VH1’s “I Want to Work for Diddy,” which ran on the cable channel starting that year. On the show, various aspiring assistants tried to impress the demanding and mercurial Mr. Combs to earn a place as his right hand. Ms. Haffoney is credited with appearances on two episodes.In her suit, she alleges that she was handed a spiked drink at an after-party in the SoHo area of Manhattan, where Mr. Combs and others were partying and “many sexual situations” were underway, making her uncomfortable. She became delirious, the suit says, and Mr. Combs “guided her head down” to perform oral sex on him. She passed out and awoke later at the cast house, and “knew that she had been sexually assaulted, raped” by him, according to the court papers.Another suit was filed by Justin Gooch, who said that in 1999, when he was 16, he met Mr. Combs at the Tunnel, then a popular dance club in Manhattan. The suit says that Mr. Combs gave him ecstasy and alcohol, and they then went to a bathroom, where Mr. Combs gave Mr. Gooch more drugs and “anally penetrated” him without his consent. According to the court papers, when he finished, Mr. Combs said to him, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”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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      The Violinist Christian Tetzlaff’s Tactic to Oppose Trump’s Agenda: Cancel Concerts

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      Christian Tetzlaff said he was disturbed by the president’s embrace of Russia and other policies. “There seems to be a quietness or denial about what’s going on,” he said.When the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff returned home to Berlin after a recent performance in Chicago, he was distraught. The concert had gone well, but he was increasingly disturbed by political developments in the United States: President Trump’s embrace of Russia, the dizzying cuts to the federal work force and changes in policies affecting transgender Americans.“I felt like a child watching a horror film,” he said in an interview.On Friday, Mr. Tetzlaff, 58, a renowned violinist who frequently performs in the United States, said that he was canceling an eight-city tour of the country with his quartet this spring — including a stop at Carnegie Hall — and that he was unlikely to perform again in America unless the government reversed course.“There seems to be a quietness or denial about what’s going on,” he said. “I feel utter anger. I cannot go on with this feeling inside. I cannot just go and play a tour of beautiful concerts.”Harrison W. Fields, a White House spokesman, offered a two-word response to Mr. Tetzlaff’s cancellation: “America first.”Mr. Tetzlaff is one of the first major foreign artists to try to use a cultural boycott to influence Mr. Trump’s policies during his second term.For decades, American artists have canceled tours as a means of protesting war, autocracy, injustice and discrimination abroad. There were cultural boycotts of South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s in protest of its policy of apartheid, and more recently, artists have refused to perform in Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.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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      Lizzo Returns With a Throwback-Rock Bop, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Benson Boone, Jenny Hval, J. Cole and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lizzo, ‘Love in Real Life’“It’s been a while,” Lizzo sings in “Love in Real Life,” after more than a year of commotion involving her social media, her weight and lawsuits from employees. The video (though not the song itself) opens with Lizzo saying she needs “no views, no likes, real love in real life.” Backed by a swinging beat and rock guitars, Lizzo heads out for a drunken night at a dance club, with a chorus topped by a Prince-like scream. For a few minutes, pleasure solves everything. JON PARELESBenson Boone, ‘Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else’The back-flipping upstart Benson Boone runs into a former flame who upends his current relationship on the lively new single “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else.” Amid driving percussion, pulsating synths and an escalating sense of urgency, Boone unfurls a satisfying narrative of love lost and regained in a sudden moment of clarity. The only problem is that he has to break another girl’s heart in the process. “Benny, don’t do it, Benny don’t do it!” he tells himself — but he does it, and lets her down easy with that classic line, “It’s not personal.” LINDSAY ZOLADZLittle Simz featuring Obongjayar and Moonchild Sanelly, ‘Flood’“Flood” exults in percussive low end: a Bo Diddley drumbeat meshed with a syncopated bass line, below Little Simz rapping in her most hard-nosed bottom range. She lashes out at anyone who’d interfere with “my genius plan, and that’s being as free as I can” and offers career advice: “Don’t trust all the hands you shake.” She’s righteous and cynical, with her defenses well fortified by rhythm. PARELESModel/Actriz, ‘Cinderella’Agitation is built in to “Cinderella,” from the where’s-the-downbeat intro to the dissonant note that repeats — irregularly — through nearly the entire track. As an industrial dance beat assembles itself, crumbles, and reappears, the vocalist Cole Haden wrestles with the vulnerability of revealing himself to a partner, finally deciding, “I won’t leave as I came.” PARELESJenny Hval, ‘To Be a Rose’The Norwegian pop experimentalist Jenny Hval takes on a familiar lyrical image — the rose — and turns it into something highly specific and alluringly strange on this first single from her upcoming album, “Iris Silver Mist.” “A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette,” she sings atop a spare track that features light, hypnotic percussion and subtle blasts of brass. As the arrangement gradually builds into something fuller, Hval sketches a vivid childhood memory of her mother smoking on a balcony, “long inhales and long exhales performed in choreography over our dead-end town.” ZOLADZWe 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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      Katy Perry and Gayle King Are Among Blue Origin’s All-Female Space Crew

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      They will be aboard the New Shepard, the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin’s space tourism business, in a launch this spring.The singer and songwriter Katy Perry and the broadcast journalist and show host Gayle King will be among the all-female crew on the next mission of New Shepard, the space tourism rocket that is operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin.Blue Origin announced the lineup on Thursday, ahead of a planned spaceflight this spring, though no specific date has been announced for the launch. It will also include Aisha Bowe, a former NASA engineer; Amanda Nguyen, a research scientist; Kerianne Flynn, a film producer; and Lauren Sánchez, who is Mr. Bezos’ fiancée and a helicopter pilot.The company has garnered attention for its flights by including celebrities or highlighting new milestones in spaceflight.The spring launch will be the 11th flight carrying passengers and the 31st mission overall for New Shepard. The suborbital rocket is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space in 1961 and one of the astronauts who walked on the moon.Flights on the fully reusable vehicle last just over 10 minutes and take participants to an altitude higher than 62 miles. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station, by contrast, orbit about 250 miles above the Earth.Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the wealthiest men on the planet, was among the first passengers on New Shepard in 2021, the year of Blue Origin’s first crewed flight.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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      Benmont Tench, Still a Heartbreaker, Is Carrying on Solo

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      Ninety pounds, the approximate weight of a Farfisa organ, nearly kept Benmont Tench from his destiny.It was late 1971, and Tench, a native of Gainesville, Fla., was home from college for Christmas. His favorite local band, Mudcrutch, was playing a five-set-a-night residency at a topless bar called Dub’s, and they’d finally invited him to join them onstage. He started to load his gear into his mother’s station wagon, hoisted his Fender amp onto the tailgate and then went to grab his organ.“I picked this thing up and it was so damn heavy,” Tench recalled. For a moment, he considered blowing the whole thing off. Instead, he heaved the Farfisa into the car. That night, he played with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the first time, forging a musical bond and forming the nucleus of what would eventually become the Heartbreakers. “But it almost didn’t happen,” Tench said in a recent interview, shaking his head at the memory. “I mean, it was that close.”More than half a century later, the Heartbreakers themselves are a memory: The group ended abruptly after Petty’s death in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose. But Tench, 71, continues to make music. His second solo album, an elegiac collection of songs titled “The Melancholy Season,” will be released on March 7.The album follows a 10-year period that included a second marriage for Tench, to the writer Alice Carbone, the birth of his first child and the loss of Petty, his longtime friend and band leader.Benmont Tench’s first solo album since 2014 was born in a tumultuous period that included the death of his longtime collaborator, Tom Petty.Chantal Anderson 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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      Billy Hart Has One Foot in Jazz’s Past and the Other in Its Future

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      Onstage at Smoke in late January, the all-star septet the Cookers were surging into high gear. The catalyst: their drummer, Billy Hart, who stirred up rhythmic eddies and punched out stinging cymbal accents while fixing the saxophonist Azar Lawrence with an eager, heat-of-battle grin.On “Just,” a new album by Hart’s own long-running quartet, out Friday, he reveals some of that intensity in a more understated guise, playing alongside vanguard musicians a quarter century or more younger — the saxophonist Mark Turner, the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street — and pulling off what has become, across his six-decade-plus career, a trademark Billy Hart feat: sounding effortlessly and perpetually contemporary.“He’s a continual, consummate student of the music,” Turner said of Hart, 84, in a phone interview. While Hart’s style draws on the many eras in which he has been active, he continued, “he hasn’t changed his language into something that is based in a period.”The bassist Buster Williams has worked with Hart since the early ’60s, first meeting him on a gig with the vocalist Betty Carter and later aligning with him in many other contexts, including the Mwandishi band, Herbie Hancock’s trailblazing electric-jazz sextet of the early ’70s. “He’s got that fresh understanding of things,” Williams said in a phone interview. “His vision is always looking forward.”Could the young Billy Hart, growing up in Washington, D.C., have envisioned such a long and thriving career? “Of course not,” he said with an incredulous laugh.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOutside the jazz world, Hart is largely unknown. But within the genre — where peers and fans refer to him as Jabali, or “rock,” one of the Swahili monikers bestowed on the members of the Mwandishi band by their associate James Mtume — his esteem is near-universal, a status reflected in a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master designation and his staggeringly broad discography, encompassing more than 600 albums.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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      Drake Postpones 4 Australia and New Zealand Tour Dates

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      Dates for Brisbane, Sydney and Auckland were postponed for a “scheduling conflict,” representatives for the rapper said. The tour coincided with the release of his latest album.Drake, whose new album topped the Billboard 200 chart this week after Kendrick Lamar had made him a punchline at the Super Bowl halftime show, has canceled four tour dates in Australia and New Zealand because of a “scheduling conflict,” representatives for the rapper said on Wednesday.It was not immediately clear what the conflict was, but Drake’s team said it would work to reschedule the dates along with adding additional shows.“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience,” Drake’s representatives said in a statement. “Drake and the entire team have had an incredible time doing these shows and are excited to return soon. We look forward to sharing the rescheduled dates with you as soon as possible.”The Anita Max Win Tour kicked off this month in Perth, Australia, and was scheduled to have 16 shows across major cities in the country and New Zealand.But Drake canceled a March 4 show in Brisbane, a March 7 show in Sydney and two shows in mid-March in Auckland, New Zealand.The tour coincided with the release of his latest album, “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” a collaboration with PartyNextDoor, a longtime Drake associate. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week.It was the first new album since his much-publicized beef with Lamar, whose diss track “Not Like Us” accused Drake of pedophilia. Drake sued Universal Music Group for defamation for releasing and promoting the song. His lawsuit called the allegations in the song false and accused the label of valuing “corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists.”But the song has continued to grow. This month Lamar won five Grammy Awards for the song, including song and record of the year, and performed it to a huge global audience at the Super Bowl halftime show.Joe Coscarelli More