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      Nicholas Evans, Author of ‘The Horse Whisperer,’ Dies at 72

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      He was a first-time novelist whose tale of a manly vocation and family trauma broke publishing and then movie rights records when Robert Redford bought them.Nicholas Evans, the British journalist turned author whose novel-turned-film, “The Horse Whisperer,” broke publishing and movie records, along with the hearts of readers who made the book a best seller in 20 countries, died on Aug. 9 at his home in London. He was 72.The cause was a heart attack, said his longtime agent, Caradoc King.In 1993, Mr. Evans, at 43, was broke and adrift. He had been working as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, and had spent two years on a film project that ultimately collapsed, when he began casting about for an idea for a novel. It was perhaps not the most winning formula for worldly success, as he noted in retrospect on his website: “Why would a debut novel from an unknown author have any more chance of getting off the ground than a movie?”Yet he had found an intriguing subject: the mystical, manly art of horse whispering. His source was a farrier, and Mr. Evans soon learned that the vocation of calming horses had a long history stretching back centuries.In England, however, horse-y matters have too much class baggage, as he put it, so he looked to the American West for his story. He came up trumps when he met Tom Dorrance, a terse cowboy then in his 80s, and watched him soothe a frenzied mare in California. He then found two other cowboys who practiced the same compelling magic, and began to craft a character inspired by these three men.Mr. Evans sat down and wrote some 150 pages of what would become “The Horse Whisperer,” a soapy drama about a young girl and her horse who are hit by a truck, and what happens when her hard-driving East Coast magazine editor mother finds a horse whisperer in Montana to heal their trauma.The healing that ensues involved more than the horse. Mr. Evans showed his draft to Mr. King, who sent the partial manuscript to a number of publishers on their way to the Frankfurt book fair that year. Suddenly, Mr. Evans was in the middle of a bidding maelstrom, juggling offers from Hollywood as well as from book publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.When Bob Bookman, the agent at the Creative Artists Agency negotiating the sale of the film rights, asked Mr. Evans what he wanted, Mr. Evans proposed a modest $50,000. “I think we can get $3 million,” said Mr. Bookman, as Sarah Lyall of The New York Times reported. And they did. Hollywood Pictures and Robert Redford’s film studio, Wildwood Pictures, won the bid, at the time the largest amount ever paid for the rights to a first novel (almost $6 million in today’s money). Mr. Evans’s North American book advance, of $3.15 million from Dell Publishing, set another record.Mr. Evans had only written 150 pages of his novel when publishers began bidding for it. His advance, of $3 million, was a record for a first time novelist. no creditThen Mr. Evans had to finish the book. He told Ms. Lyall he had become morbidly superstitious: He stopped riding his bicycle, and took the slow lane when driving. What he did not disclose, not even to his agent, was that he had been diagnosed with melanoma. Nonetheless, he survived, and thrived. The book, which was published in 1995, was a global best seller that was translated into 40 languages, though critics slammed it for its melodrama. Michiko Kakutani, writing in The New York Times, called it “a sappy romance novel, gussied up with some sentimental claptrap about the emotional life of animals and lots of Walleresque hooey about men and women.”“About the only thing missing,” she added, “is a picture of Fabio on the cover.”The movie, which came out in 1998, was more favorably reviewed and a modest box office success, thanks to Mr. Redford’s star power and firm hand as director. He delivered a more restrained version of Mr. Evans’s tale, playing Tom Brooker, the horse whisperer. Kristin Scott Thomas was Annie MacLean, the mother, and Scarlett Johansson played Grace, the daughter. Sam Neill was Annie’s cuckolded husband. Mr. Redford’s version ended rather ambiguously; Mr. Evans had chosen a more confrontational route, and he was initially upset by the change.Robert Redford as the star in the film “The Horse Whisperer (1998), which he also directed.TouchstoneFor better or worse, Mr. Evans had unknowingly introduced the word “whisperer” into the popular lexicon as a catchall term for experts who can tame complicated creatures, like babies.“It was an extraordinary event,” said Mr. King, remembering the frenzy surrounding Mr. Evans’s novel. “It was just the magic of the story. That was the thing.”Nicholas Evans was born on July 26, 1950, in Worcestershire, in England’s West Midlands. He studied law at Oxford University, graduating with a First, the highest honors. He worked as a journalist for newspapers and television and produced a weekly current affairs show. In the 1980s, he made documentary films about the artists David Hockney and Francis Bacon, the writer Patricia Highsmith and the filmmaker David Lean, among others.He followed “The Horse Whisperer” with three more novels, all best sellers. “The Divide” (2005), explores what led to the death of a young woman whose body is found in a frozen mountain creek. The story was inspired, he told The Associated Press, by his own interrogations into what causes rifts in a marriage — a marriage come asunder is the book’s back story. His own 25-year marriage had recently ended, he said.Like his characters, Mr. Evans was an avid outdoorsman, a charming Bill Nighy look-alike who skied and hiked. And in August of 2008 he seemed to fall into the plot of one of his own stories, a family idyll turned into a near tragedy.He and his second wife, Charlotte Gordon Cumming, a singer-songwriter, were staying with her brother, Alastair Gordon Cumming, and his wife, Lady Louisa, in the Scottish Highlands. They had picked and enjoyed a meal of wild mushrooms, which turned out to be poisonous. All four became sick, and their kidneys soon failed. Mr. Evans, Ms. Gordon Cumming and her brother required years of dialysis — and new kidneys. Mr. Evans’s daughter Lauren donated one of hers. Ms. Gordon Cumming was offered the kidney of her son’s best friend’s mother, and Mr. Cumming’s came from a patient who had died. Mr. Evans became a patron of a kidney donation charity. Ms. Gordon Cumming made a documentary film about her experience.Mr. Evans’s survivors include his wife and four children, Finlay, Lauren, Max and Harry.His reviews grew more positive with every book. Nonetheless, he tended to avoid reading them.“The book business is such a strange one — and the very definition of literary versus commercial fiction has always seemed to me to be bizarre,” Mr. Evans told The Guardian in 2011. “One is defined by how many it sells, and the other by its ideas and so-called literary merit. And there are all kinds of assumptions brought to bear on this. So for example, if you sell tons of books you can’t possibly have any interesting ideas or themes or things to say. And on the other hand, if nobody buys the book, it’s considered a mark of its esteem because nobody is bright enough to understand it.” More

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      in Television

      In ‘House of the Dragon,’ Paddy Considine Claims the Crown

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      A string of critically acclaimed roles has made him many British actors’ favorite actor. It has also lifted him from hardscrabble roots to a seat on the Iron Throne.WINSHILL, England — On a blindingly sunny June afternoon, Paddy Considine whipped his sedan through a working-class neighborhood in this suburb in the West Midlands, pointing out the stolid taverns, churches and council houses that combine to cast the long shadows of his childhood.There was the gospel hall where he and his friends sang hymns when they weren’t “getting kicked out for fighting about.” The pub where men from his estate pursued nightly oblivion. The post office where his tempestuous father “tossed a wheelie bin through the front window” during one of his frequent swerves into rage, a moment Considine memorialized in his bleakly beautiful 2011 film, “Tyrannosaur.”He pulled to a stop in front of a pale gray two-family house and pointed to an upstairs window. It was his old bedroom, and he told a story about a kid desperate to show the world he had more to offer than it might think.“I’d run home after school and then put the music on and stand in the window, dancing to Adam and the Ants, so the parents would see me and look up,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was a show-off. I just wanted to be seen.”He looked at me with a grin that was equal parts affable and intense. “There’s a difference, you know,” he said.Over a two-decade career in film, TV and the occasional blockbuster play, Considine has thrived within that difference. He has crafted performances that demand to be seen, partly because they forgo performative pyrotechnics in favor of a palpable, at times unsettling sense of the real. The fact that he hasn’t had what you might call a signature role hasn’t kept him from becoming many British actors’ favorite actor.“I just believe him,” said Olivia Colman, a longtime admirer. “You sort of look into his eyes, and he’s feeling it all, and he means it all.”Considine’s profile is more modest in America, but it might not stay that way: Beginning on Aug. 21, he will be dancing in his largest window yet. That’s when “House of the Dragon,” the long-awaited “Game of Thrones” prequel series, lands on HBO. A family melodrama with all the violence, sex and power-lust one would expect from a tale set in Westeros, the series seeks to recapture the magic that made the original a global phenomenon before it stumbled to its polarizing conclusion in 2019.The story, based on “Fire & Blood,” a spinoff novel by the saga’s mastermind, George R.R. Martin, is set nearly 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones.” It involves an earlier battle for the Iron Throne, one that threatens to crater the Targaryen clan long before their combustible descendant Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) arrives in the original series.At the heart of it all is Considine, who stars as King Viserys, the ruler whose decisions and frailties set into motion much of the conflict and carnage to come.Paddy Considine, who plays King Viserys Targaryen, in a scene from “House of the Dragon.”Ollie Upton/HBOIt is a surprising bit of casting, at first glance. After arriving as an eccentric thug in the 1999 film “A Room for Romeo Brass,” Considine has made his name mostly in small-bore dramas playing emotionally conflicted men who feel it all, and then some: a grieving immigrant father in “In America”; a religious zealot ex-con in “My Summer of Love”; a murderously vengeful veteran in “Dead Man’s Shoes.”While he has appeared in franchises (“The Bourne Ultimatum”), genre series (the Stephen King adaptation “The Outsider”) and surprising detours before (the goofball cop comedy “Hot Fuzz”), a dragon epic did not seem like the most natural fit.“If you look at the body of his work and the type of movies that he does, it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a big HBO franchise like this,” said Matt Smith, who stars in “House of the Dragon” as Viserys’s belligerent brother, Daemon. “But I think he’s got good taste, and I think he realized the part was really interesting.”Considine, 48, is a man of multitudes and paradoxes. An acclaimed actor, he nonetheless struggles with attacks of insecurity to the point that he considered leaving projects like “Hot Fuzz” because he felt he was flailing. He has an unmistakable toughness, but what makes it captivating is the sensitivity that bleeds through.Ryan Condal, one of the “House of the Dragon” showrunners, said that Considine imbued Viserys, a relatively passive character in the script, “with a bit of Paddy’s working class background.”“What Paddy brought to it was Targaryen-ness, this fierceness,” he said. But as the other showrunner, Miguel Sapochnik, noted: “He wears his insecurities on his sleeve.”Return to Westeros in ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited “Game of Thrones” spinoff will debut on Aug. 21.A Primer: Though it is the successor to the groundbreaking fantasy drama, “House of the Dragon” is actually a prequel. Here’s what else you need to know.The Stakes: Can the new series save the future of the “Game of Thrones” franchise? George R.R. Martin and HBO are about to find out.Wearing the Crown: A string of critically acclaimed roles has lifted Paddy Considine, who stars as King Viserys Targaryen in the show, from hardscrabble roots to a seat on the Iron Throne.‘Thrones’ Guide: Want to take a deep dive into past episodes and plot twists? Check out our obsessive compendium to the original series.This combination has already won over the toughest “Thrones” fan of all: Martin, who said Considine’s Viserys surpasses the one in the book.“Every once in a while, an actor or the writers will take a character in a somewhat different direction that is better,” Martin said. “And I look at it and I say, ‘Damn, I wish I had written it that way.’”Considine admits that he was flattered to be asked to lead such an enormous undertaking, which will almost certainly result in more people seeing him than ever before. But what drew him in were the same things he seeks in all his roles, qualities that his past and predisposition help him depict with rare delicacy.“There was just conflicts in him; there was pain in him,” he said. “There was stuff for me to do.”CONSIDINE SPENDS MOST OF HIS TIME far from the show-business fray. He lives with his wife of 20 years, Shelley, and their three children in the town of Burton-on-Trent, near where he grew up, located roughly 110 miles northwest of London. It helps him avoid having to glad-hand industry types or audition for roles, which he loathes because he’s terrible at it, he said.While Considine is generally immune to Hollywood cliché, he certainly looked the part when we first met. Sitting inside a coffee shop in a posh village near his home, he was wearing black on black with dark glasses, and he spent the first 20 minutes talking about his rock band, called Riding the Low. He knew how it all came across.“I know … an actor with a band,” he said.But the reality is, he has been playing music for longer than he’s been acting, and the band is no mere vanity project: In June, they played Glastonbury Festival, and their latest record included a cameo by Considine’s musical hero, Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices.As for the glasses, they contain special lenses to treat Irlen syndrome, a disorder that is believed to affect the brain’s ability to process visual information. (Much of the science and medical community is skeptical about the affliction, but Considine and many others say the lenses changed their lives.) Generally funny and easygoing in conversation, Considine said this condition, along with a mild form of Asperger’s he was diagnosed with in his 30s, contributed to a reputation for aloofness as a young actor.“I couldn’t concentrate or focus on you, so I’d have to look away,” he said. “It led to this behavior of me going within myself and being slightly unapproachable.”But he is used to being misunderstood — even as a boy in Winshill, Considine had a reputation that preceded him. But it wasn’t his own.Considine’s father was known as a brawler with a quick temper. “I grew up with a lot of labels on me when I was a kid, just because of the reputation mainly of my father,” the actor said.Max Miechowski for The New York TimesHe grew up with a brother and four sisters in one of the few two-parent households in his social circle. His mother, Pauline, was a natural nurturer who temporarily took in kids from around the council estate when things got rough at their own homes. “I’d go downstairs and there’d be, like, a six-foot punk lying on the sofa under a blanket, with a big red mohawk,” Considine said.His father was another matter. An Irish alcoholic with a depressive streak, Martin Considine was known as a brawler with a quick temper, and was given to staying in bed until the afternoon, “watching ‘Raging Bull’ over and over again,” Considine said.“I grew up with a lot of labels on me when I was a kid, just because of the reputation mainly of my father,” he said.For a while, he lived up to them, alienating his teachers by being an uninterested student and a class clown. But when he signed on to a school production of “Grease,” it was transformative in more ways than one. When he opened his mouth to sing “Greased Lightning” in the first rehearsal, he discovered a robust voice he didn’t know he had. On opening night, everyone else discovered something, too.“It changed the entire school’s perception of me,” he said. “The teachers perceived me differently, the students. And I thought, this is powerful.”At 16, Considine began a drama program but “didn’t really learn that much, and I just left,” he said. (He eventually got a photography degree.) But he struck up a fortuitous friendship there with Shane Meadows, a fellow Midlander with similar tastes in music and film. Several years later, Meadows cast Considine in “Romeo Brass,” which won both men acclaim.Higher-profile roles followed in films like the Factory Records chronicle “24 Hour Party People” (2002) and the melancholy immigrant tale “In America” (2003). Then came “Dead Man’s Shoes,” a nervy, lo-fi riff on a slasher picture that stars Considine, in a frightening but grounded performance, as an ex-soldier stalking his brother’s former tormentors.The film is still revered in Britain — nearly everyone I talked to about Considine mentioned it — though the actor long ago tired of discussing it. (“Part of me wants to die” when people bring it up, he said, but he has made his peace with it.)That indelible performance indirectly enabled Considine to subvert it, to change perceptions again. He met Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright on the awards circuit for “Dead Man’s Shoes” — it and their film “Shaun of the Dead” were both released in Britain in 2004 — and the result was a part as a doofus detective in “Hot Fuzz.”“Meeting Paddy in person was a revelation; he was incredibly warm and funny,” Wright wrote in an email. “We knew he had a comic presence that hadn’t been fully unleashed yet.”Considine (center, with Rafe Spall, left, and Simon Pegg) tried to quit “Hot Fuzz” over a crisis of confidence about his comic chops. “This was, of course, ridiculous,” said Edgar Wright, the film’s director.Rogue Pictures, via Alamy“Hot Fuzz” was where Considine met Colman, a co-star, who went on to lead his first feature as a director, “Tyrannosaur.” The film, which he also wrote, tells a grueling but powerful story about a splenetic widower (Peter Mullan) who befriends a devout woman (Colman) trapped in an abusive marriage.For Colman, then known primarily for comedy and TV, the wrenching performance opened new dramatic opportunities that eventually led to an Oscar for the 2018 film “The Favourite.”“He sort of directly changed the trajectory of my career,” she said.For Considine, it offered a chance to revisit his upbringing via the means that had allowed him to escape it. As we drove around Winshill, he pointed out landmarks that had inspired scenes in the film.“I think ‘Tyrannosaur’ was just a love letter and an apology to my parents,” he told me. “It was me just trying to make sense of some of the things I grew up with.”CONSIDINE STARTED ACTING long before he became an actor.As an insecure kid cowed by a chaotic home and by other parents who “shut doors in my face” because of the sins of his father, he learned to perform confidence and swagger. “I had to create a sort of carapace to be able to protect myself,” he said.That armor never entirely went away — he still dusts it off for premieres and red carpets. Neither did the insecurity. As his career blossomed, it became both the thing that made acting a misery, at times, as well as a force pushing him to go deeper into performances that dazzled his contemporaries.“In England, I think a lot of actors feel the same way about Paddy,” Smith said. “We hold him in very high regard.”Tony Pitts (“All Creatures Great and Small”), a friend of Considine’s and past co-star, called him “the male actor that most male actors want to be.”Considine is choosy about his parts — it’s hard to find an outright stinker on his IMDb page. Friends say this derives from the fact that acting can take a profound psychic toll on him, so he has to be invested in a role to accept it.“Paddy’s not one to just pitch up and say the lines,” Pitts said. “I’ve seen him when he’s been at the point where he said, ‘I don’t think I want to act again.’”Wright calls Considine “Mr. 11th Hour” because that’s when he “had to be talked out of leaving” both “Hot Fuzz” and a later comedy, “The World’s End,” over a crisis of confidence about his comic chops. “This was, of course, ridiculous,” Wright said. “It just shows me he cares, maybe too much.”From left, Glenn Speers, Considine, Stuart Graham and Genevieve O’Reilly in “The Ferryman,” Considine’s first performance in a play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesConsidine went through something similar in “The Ferryman,” Jez Butterworth’s 2017 drama set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It was Considine’s first play, and he took it on as a kind of trial-by-fire apprenticeship because he felt limited by his lack of formal acting training, even after numerous series and films. “I was running out of places to hide, and I was running out of enthusiasm for it, too,” he said.He found stage acting terrifying. His self-doubt reached a crisis point during the initial run, at London’s Royal Court Theater, and then again when “The Ferryman” moved to Broadway — both times Sam Mendes, the director, helped him through it. (Reviewing the Broadway production, The Times said Considine gave “a superb, anchoring performance.”) The actor now says “The Ferryman” was “a game-changer,” in terms of his comfort with his craft.That comfort wasn’t always apparent on “House of the Dragon,” however. Considine said he based the physically ailing Viserys partly on his mother, who went through multiple amputations resulting from diabetes before dying of a heart attack. Colleagues said watching him inhabit the role sometimes bordered on concerning.“He turns himself inside out in his performance, and that metamorphosis is sometimes really painful to watch,” said Olivia Cooke, who stars as Alicent Hightower, a woman close to Viserys. “We spoke about it, and the only way he can access his performance, sometimes, is to go to such a horrid and painful place.”Sapochnik said that when Considine struggles with material or anything else, “his default is anger.” Directing him involved “helping to work through that, being patient about it, sometimes saying to him, ‘Mate, calm down,’” he explained. “But also then seeing how he brought that into Viserys.”Considine brought fierceness to Viserys, but he also “wears his insecurities on his sleeve,” said Miguel Sapochnik (right, with Considine and the actress Milly Alcock), a “House of the Dragon” showrunner.Ollie Upton/HBOAt the same time, his co-stars, from old hands like Smith to relative newcomers like Emily Carey, who plays a younger version of Alicent, roundly praised Considine as a funny, warm and supportive colleague and collaborator. The person he is hardest on is himself.“It sounds like I’m a miserable sod, but I have a good time doing these things, as well,” Considine said. “It’s just that when I perform in any way, I have these challenges in front of me again.”What keeps him going are the flashes of transcendence. He mentioned one late-season monologue Viserys gives before his family that “touched a bit of old Hopkins,” as in Sir Anthony, one of his acting heroes.“The moments where you are fully in it, all that goes — all that awareness, all that self-observation, all that stuff, that inner critic,” Considine said. “That horrible stuff just falls off you. And that’s ultimately what I’m searching for.”And to the extent that any of that horrible stuff is linked to his past, he’s learning to let some of that fall off him, too, as achievements mount and the passing years bring distance and perspective.“That kid in the window, he hasn’t got to die, but it can’t keep dominating your life,” he said. “You’ve got to explore other things, and ‘Game of Thrones’ is part of that.”“Who would’ve thought that kid would end up playing a [expletive] king?” he added. “Who would’ve ever conceived that I would be a king in anything?” More

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      in Music

      After 350 Years of Tradition, a Boys’ Choir Now Admits Girls

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      The Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, is the latest English choir to start including female singers, a move some fear will reduce opportunities for boys.CAMBRIDGE, England — At 8 a.m. one recent Thursday, the boys of the Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, stifled yawns as they began their first rehearsal of the day with some vocal exercises. Soon, the room was filled with a host of “Ooo” and “Zah” sounds.Once the choir was warmed up, Andrew Nethsingha, its music director, called upon boy after boy to sing a couple of lines of a psalm solo.Then, the director did something none of his predecessors had, in the choir’s entire 350-year history: He called upon a girl to sing. Amelia Crichton-Stuart, 10, quickly pushed her glasses up her nose and sang, high and pure, two lines about how God’s “right hand is full of righteousness.”“Very good,” Nethsingha said, with a smile. After one of the other choristers pointed out that Crichton-Stuart had sung one word incorrectly, not lengthening it as in the notation, Nethsingha said he preferred what she had sung. “We’re going to change the choir to do your version!” he told Crichton-Stuart, who beamed with joy.For centuries, British choral music has been a largely male space, with the country’s cathedrals and chapels filled with the angelic voices of boy choristers, who perform daily services with male singers supplying the bass parts.The choir arrives at St John’s College Chapel for an evensong service earlier this month. Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAmelia Crichton-Stuart said the boys had been “really welcoming.”Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesFor centuries, British choral music has been a largely male space.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe Rev. Dr. Mark Oakley gives the new choristers their white surplices, as they end their probationary period and join the choir.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesThe choirs have become an iconic part of British musical life, with the boys usually living and studying for free at schools linked to the choirs (the children of the St. John’s choir attend a school founded in the 17th century for the education of the choristers).In the 1990s, a host of cathedrals in Britain set up separate girls’ choirs to perform services, too, but the recent move by the Choir of St. John’s — generally considered one of England’s best — to mix genders has been greeted by choral insiders as groundbreaking. Some have celebrated it as a long overdue step toward equality, and others have agonized that it may herald the demise of boys-only choirs.Shortly after Nethsingha announced the change last October, three other choirs said they would be mixing girls and boys too, including St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle (a place of such tradition it has hosted numerous royal weddings, including Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s in 2018).Nethsingha said in an interview that he knew the move was bold, but he also felt “rather late to the party,” since a couple of less prominent choirs, including the Choir of St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, mixed their choristers in the 1970s. Nethsingha received some complaints about the decision, he added, mostly on the college’s Facebook page.Other choirs who have decided to mix boys and girls said they had similarly received a few negative reactions. Charles Harrison, the choir master at Chichester Cathedral, said he was sent “half a dozen” letters of complaint, including one from a regular donor who announced they were withdrawing their support.The choir’s new members have also begun boarding at the choir’s associated school, just like the boys.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesBut Nethsingha said he didn’t regret the move. In April, he admitted Crichton-Stuart, alongside Martha Gritten, 9, and Ingrid B., also 9 (Ingrid’s parents did not want her surname included in this article for reasons of privacy). The girls began boarding at the choir’s associated school just like the boys. In the same month, Nina Vinther, 24, joined the choir’s adult ranks.Britain is not the only country whose choral world is agonizing over whether to include girls. In 2019, a German court blocked a 9-year-old girl’s attempt to join one of Berlin’s oldest choirs on the grounds that artistic freedom was more important than equal treatment — despite studies having shown that differences between young girls’ and boys’ voices are slight, and even professional singers can’t always tell the difference.Opponents of mixing choirs insist there are many good reasons to exclude girls. Alan Thurlow, a retired choral director and a vice president of the Traditional Cathedral Choir Association, which offers grants to men’s and boys’ choirs, said in a telephone interview that he worried if choirs admitted girls, it would mean fewer boys would be able, or want, to join.“You’re not making the choir bigger, you’re reducing the opportunity for boys,” he said, adding that boys can only sing high vocal parts for a few years before their voices change. A drop in the number of boys trained would also mean fewer bass and tenor singers for adult choirs, he added.Nethsingha said his choir was increasing the number of choristers from 20 to 25 to avoid reducing opportunities for boys. He hoped separate girls’ and boys’ choirs would continue to exist, he added. “I don’t want to be remembered in 100 years time as the chief destroyer of boys’ choirs,” he said, with a nervous laugh.During evensong, the choir stood in the chapel’s stalls, their voices soaring and echoing around the vast space.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt least one part of the choral world isn’t deliberating the implications of mixing: the children doing the singing. Last year, when Nethsingha told his boys that girls would be joining them, he said he braced himself for a “barrage of complaints.” Instead, the boys asked just four practical questions — including one about whether they had sufficient toilets for new joiners — then “went bouncing off to their lessons,” Nethsingha said.“They didn’t have any of the baggage that adults have,” he added.In an interview after the recent rehearsal, the girls seemed equally undaunted by joining a famed choir, with daily performances, international tours and recordings. Asked if they felt like pioneers, Gritten said, “Sort of, but sort of not!” She then looked at her fellow choristers and giggled.Crichton-Stuart said the boys had been “really welcoming,” and they played together in their dormitories. The best part of choir life so far, Gritten said, had been Ascension Day — commemorating Jesus’s rise to heaven — where the entire choir climbed up to the top of the college’s chapel, via a spiral staircase, and sung from its roof.Many major choirs here have made it clear they will not be mixing choirs on a daily basis. In May, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London announced that it would introduce a separate girls choir from 2025. Andrew Carwood, its music director, said in a telephone interview that the cathedral needed to raise 7.5 million pounds, nearly $9 million, to pay for choristers’ school fees and make changes to buildings to accommodate 30 new female singers. Boys and girls would likely sing together for major services, he added.The choir’s music director, Andrew Nethsingha, right, said he felt “rather late to the party,” just this year opening the choir to girls.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt St. John’s, the girls were already fully involved in all services. About eight hours after their morning rehearsal, 18 of the choir’s child members and 13 adult choral scholars walked into the college’s grand chapel, to sing that day’s traditional evensong service. Stood in the stalls, their voices soared and echoed around the vast space.At one point, the choir walked to the front of the chapel and performed an experimental piece involving an electronic backing of whale sounds, the girls’ red outfits standing out among the boys’ white robes. But many of the 60 worshipers in the chapel had their eyes closed, so absorbed in the music bouncing around them, they weren’t looking at who was making it. More

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      ‘Country House Operas’ Offer a Glimpse of Opera’s Future

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      Steeped in romantic history, smaller “country house operas” such as Grange Park Opera, west of London, offer a leisurely pace and less overhead.When the British TV host Bamber Gascoigne unexpectedly inherited a 350-acre estate in 2014 from his 99-year-old great-aunt, he was stunned by the inheritance tax bill he was facing, not to mention the upkeep of a crumbling 50-room house once briefly owned by Henry VIII.His solution: Set up a registered charity, or trust, to turn it all into an arts center, including a summer opera festival looking for a new home. Like an intervention by the gods in a Wagner opera, the tax bill was slashed, a 700-seat theater was built in about 11 months and the well-heeled came to frolic at West Horsley Place, which had been largely frolic-free for decades.The success of Grange Park Opera (its current season runs through July 17), about 23 miles west of London, is an example of a symbiotic relationship between old English country estates that benefit from becoming a British charity and a thirst for highbrow arts and socializing away from the bustle of the capital in the summertime.A recent performance of “La Gioconda” at Grange Park Opera. Marc BrennerIt is one of several so-called country house operas around Britain. Others include Garsington (in a temporary structure on the Getty estate) and The Grange Festival (in a dilapidated Greek Revival mansion, which was Grange Park Opera’s first home, starting in 1998). There is also Glyndebourne, which in 1934 began daylong outings to an opera in the country, complete with champagne while strolling the grounds, picnics on lawns or tucked away in garden corners, and lavish meals in dining rooms sheltered from the elements.“If you go to the opera in London, you have to scramble for a drink at the interval or gulp down something to eat in 20 minutes,” said Wasfi Kani, the founder and chief executive of Grange Park Opera. “But instead of just a few hours in an evening, you can make it a half day, have a walk in the country and enjoy your dinner at a leisurely pace.”That pace — and an unofficial dress code of tuxedos and evening gowns — also harks back to the opera of old. To some, the country house operas are not only steeped in the romantic history of upper-crust England, but, ironically, may also provide a glimpse of how opera may survive.“Houses like Grange Park are somewhat the future of opera because they are smaller and have less overhead, which is appropriate for dwindling audiences,” said the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja, who returns to the festival this summer in “La Gioconda” after opening the opera house in 2017 with “Tosca.” “They built all of it in less than a year, and right up to the last minute. We were doing ‘Tosca,’ and the soprano was singing ‘Mario, Mario, Mario’ to the sound of drilling.”Christina and Bamber Gascoigne in 2017. The couple turned West Horsley Place, a centuries-old English estate, into the current home of Grange Park Opera.Grange Park OperaThe company, which usually stages four operas or musicals each summer, has an annual operating budget of around 4 million pounds, about $4.9 million, and a full-time staff of about 12 (with 300 to 400 part-time workers during the summer). Like most other country house operas, it is funded entirely by ticket sales and donations, receiving no government money.Mr. Gascoigne, the original host of the popular TV show “University Challenge,” died in February at 87. But his vision to make West Horsley Place a trust — similar to a U.S. nonprofit organization — is intact, and the opera company, a separate charity, has a 99-year lease on the estate.The core of the 50-room mansion dates from the 15th century, and Mr. Gascoigne’s great-aunt, Mary Innes-Ker, the Duchess of Roxburghe, was its last resident (her ashes are buried beneath the orchestra pit). She lived alone for years in an almost Miss Havisham-like existence where few visitors went beyond the front rooms. When she died in 2014, the home and grounds were in disrepair.“Every time there was a new drip, she thought: Get a new bucket,” Mr. Gascoigne was quoted as saying in 2018.Ms. Kani had been looking for a new home for Grange Park Opera, since its previous home was quite far for its core London audience. She read about Mr. Gascoigne and the house and debt he was being saddled with. It seemed like a moment to seize.A picnic on the grounds of West Horsley Place.Richard LewisohnTurning the property into an arts center with an opera house seemed like a fine idea to Mr. Gascoigne and his wife, Christina. Many of the home’s furnishings and artworks — along with silver, crystal, servants’ outfits and even a long-lost pencil and chalk drawing that thrilled Sotheby’s experts — were auctioned to offset the remaining tax bill and pay for repairs on the house. Mr. Gascoigne gave up about £20 million in assets to create the trust.“Grange Park Opera approached Bamber and me at the perfect time,” said Ms. Gascoigne, who was married to Mr. Gascoigne for 57 years. “What was a potential financial burden became almost a community service for Bamber in his final years.”And his legacy plays out in a five-year-old opera house and the meandering gardens, honoring opera’s leisurely origins when the European elite had little more to do on a given day than listen to opera and fuss with their formal wear.“I’ve always said that a third of them come because it’s an amazing place, a third of them come to see the opera and a third of them to say they’ve been there,” Ms. Kani said. More

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      Kevin Spacey Facing Sexual Assault Charges in Britain

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      British prosecutors said that they had authorized criminal charges against Mr. Spacey, 62, for four counts of sexual assault. He cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales. LONDON — The British authorities have authorized criminal charges against Kevin Spacey on four counts of sexual assault against three men, the country’s Crown Prosecution Service announced in a news release on Thursday.Rosemary Ainslie, head of the service’s special crime division, said in the release that the service had also authorized one charge against Mr. Spacey, 62, of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.”The authorization of charges followed a review of the evidence collected by London’s police force. Mr. Spacey cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales, a spokesman for the service said in a telephone interview. The spokesman declined to comment on whether the service would pursue extradition proceedings if that did not occur. The news release said the charges concerned three complainants. The incidents dated from March 2005, August 2008 and April 2013, it added — a time when Mr. Spacey was artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. All the incidents occurred in London, except one from 2013, which occurred in Gloucestershire, England. The Metropolitan Police said that one of the men was now “in his 40s” and that the other two were now in their 30s, but did not provide their exact ages.Representatives for Mr. Spacey did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The first person to publicly accuse Mr. Spacey of sexual misconduct was the actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Mr. Spacey had made unwanted sexual advances toward him in the 1980s, when he was 14 years old.Soon after that a former television anchor came forward to accuse Mr. Spacey of sexually assaulting her son, and then 20 people who worked with Mr. Spacey at the Old Vic theater in London, where he was artistic director for 11 years, accused him of inappropriate behavior. The theater commissioned an independent investigation, which Mr. Spacey did not take part in, and issued a report that concluded that “his stardom and status at the Old Vic may have prevented people, and in particular junior staff or young actors, from feeling that they could speak up or raise a hand for help.”The report said that the theater had not been able to independently verify the allegations. But some actors and members of the staff did go public. One actor, Roberto Cavazos, wrote on Facebook that he “had a couple of nasty encounters with Spacey that were close to being called harassment” at the theater. “It seems that it only took a male under 30 to make Mr. Spacey feel free to touch us,” Mr. Cavazos wrote.The Old Vic said in a statement that it could not comment on ongoing criminal proceedings. In 2018, Mr. Spacey was charged with the sexual assault of the television anchor’s 18-year-old son in Nantucket, Mass. Prosecutors dropped the case when the accuser invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to continue testifying.A massage therapist sued Mr. Spacey in California in 2019, accusing him of groping and trying to kiss him before offering him oral sex during a massage. The accuser died unexpectedly ahead of the trial and the case was dismissed when his estate dropped the lawsuit.Mr. Spacey is a two-time Academy Award winner. He won the best actor Oscar in 2000 for his work in “American Beauty,” and in 1996 he won best supporting actor for “The Usual Suspects.” He was also a prominent stage actor, winning a Tony Award in 1991 as a featured actor in “Lost in Yonkers,” and he was the host of the Tony Awards in 2017. But he had a rapid fall from grace after the accusations by Mr. Rapp, who has an ongoing lawsuit against him, which were followed by more accusations. After Mr. Rapp’s allegations were first published in BuzzFeed, Mr. Spacey released a statement saying that he did not recall the episode but apologized for what he said “would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.” In court papers, Mr. Spacey denied Mr. Rapp’s allegations that when Mr. Rapp was underage, Mr. Spacey had grabbed his buttocks and lifted him onto a bed.Mr. Spacey appeared in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday for a hearing about the proper venue for Mr. Rapp’s lawsuit. As he left the courthouse, Mr. Spacey declined to acknowledge reporters’ questions about the developments in Britain, according to The New York Post. Mr. Spacey leaving the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday, where there was a hearing about a civil lawsuit he is facing.John Minchillo/Associated PressTV and film producers started dropping Mr. Spacey from projects after Mr. Rapp went public and more allegations followed, including from the Netflix political drama “House of Cards,” which finished its run without the actor. But more recently, he has found roles in smaller films, including an Italian feature and an American thriller.In January, Croatian newspapers reported that Mr. Spacey was shooting a movie in the country in which he played Franjo Tudjman, the onetime Communist general who led Croatia to independence. This month, Deadline reported that he had signed up for a historical drama called “1242 — Gateway to the West” scheduled to start shooting in Hungary and Mongolia in October. The movie would tell the story of one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. It was being sold at the Cannes Film Festival, Deadline added. His new American thriller was also being sold at Cannes, according to Rolling Stone.Alex Marshall More

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      in Television

      A French Hit on Netflix Changes Its Language and Streaming Service

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      “Call My Agent!,” set at a Parisian talent agency, was a cult favorite during the pandemic. But the English-language adaptation will be on Sundance Now and AMC+.Four bumbling talent agents at risk of losing their business because of poor financial planning. A secret daughter interested in a career in the entertainment industry. Cameos by famous actors playing themselves. One spoiled dog. This is the formula that made the French show “Call My Agent!,” about a Parisian talent agency, into a global hit once it began appearing on Netflix in 2016.On Friday, the British version of the show, titled “Ten Percent” and set at a London talent agency, will debut. But instead of airing on Netflix, the eight-episode series will premiere on Sundance Now and AMC+ in the United States, and Amazon U.K. in Britain, Canada and six other English-speaking territories.Basing an English-language TV show on a popular hit from another country is a tried-and-true convention in the U.S. entertainment industry. Think “Homeland” and “Euphoria” — or even “The Office,” which began life with Ricky Gervais in England before being adapted into the long-running American version starring Steve Carell.“Ten Percent” was conceived in much the same way. David Davoli, who heads the television division for Bron Studios, negotiated, along with London’s Headline Pictures, for the English rights to “Call My Agent!” in 2017, after the show debuted on Netflix but before it truly caught on with English-speaking audiences. According to Mr. Davoli, it was already doing “bonkers numbers on French television,” where it debuted in 2015. Yet it was before “the dawn of international television where people were more comfortable ingesting foreign language stuff,” he said.What makes “Ten Percent” unique is that usually the English-language version is adapted from a show not widely seen in the United States. Not so with “Call My Agent!,” which became a cult favorite with American audiences during the pandemic. The show has run for four seasons on Netflix — with talk of a possible fifth to come — and inspired a film and adaptations in India and Turkey. Its star, Camille Cottin, could be seen in the films “House of Gucci” and “Stillwater” last year.“Call My Agent!” became available on Netflix in 2016.Christophe Brachet/NetflixNetflix won’t give details on the show’s viewership numbers, but the company’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos referred to the series in his January earnings call as proof that Netflix’s investment in international programming was paying off. It, along with “Money Heist” and “Squid Game,” proved to streaming companies that if a show is good enough, subtitles and cultural specificity are not a deterrent for viewers. And if that’s the case, why spend money on an English-language version? The Race to Rule Streaming TVA New Era: Companies like Netflix, HBO, Hulu and Amazon ushered out the age of “prestige TV” and ushered in an age of anything goes.Netflix’s Woes: The streaming star lost subscribers for the first time in a decade as competitors are continuing to expand.A Warning Sign?: Netflix’s sudden problems may be an indication that other streaming services are heading toward an unstable future.Commercials: Streaming executives are having a change of heart about ads and offering lower-priced versions in exchange for commercials.In contrast, “Ten Percent” will appear on a much smaller platform, one with nine million subscribers, just 12 percent of Netflix’s 74.6 million subscribers in the United States and Canada. (It stars Jack Davenport as the de facto head of the agency and will feature cameos from well-known British actors including Helena Bonham Carter, Dominic West and David Oyelowo.)Netflix had the opportunity to buy “Ten Percent,” as did every other streaming service in the United States, but passed. It declined to comment on its decision. Instead, Sundance Now came up with an attractive offer and licensed the show.“We’re very happy to be there,” Mr. Davoli said of his relationship with AMC Networks, which owns Sundance Now. “I like being a bigger fish in a smaller pond. I think we’re going to get way more attention there. Marketing is half the battle, and on some of the bigger streamers they’re up on Friday and gone on Monday.”AMC Networks, which owns a handful of niche streaming options including AMC+, Acorn TV, Shudder, Sundance Now and AllBlk, will also air the show weekly on its BBC America channel, two days after the episodes become available through streaming.“We jumped at the chance to make Sundance Now the U.S. home of the British remake,” said Shannon Cooper, vice president of programming for Sundance Now. “This is such a fun watch, whether you’ve seen the original or not.”This is a rocky moment for streaming, with Netflix’s stock plummeting after last week’s announcement that it lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of the year and expected to lose two million beyond that in the second. Despite the deluge of content arriving weekly on the various services, consumers are happy to end a subscription if the latest offerings aren’t striking their fancy.Helena Bonham Carter, right, is one of the celebrities playing a version of themselves in “Ten Percent.” Lydia Leonard is one of the show’s stars.Rob Youngson/Sundance NowAccording to a recent survey by Deloitte, 37 percent of consumers in the United States added or canceled a streaming subscription in the last six months, a churn figure that has been consistent since 2020. The primary reasons they cited were price concerns and lack of new content. The return of a favorite show, according to Deloitte’s survey, is a key reason customers would subscribe to a service, or resubscribe to one they recently abandoned. That’s why a show like “Ten Percent,” which has the potential to lure viewers who enjoyed “Call My Agent!,” is an attractive purchase for an upstart streaming service.“It’s an appealing proposition for any of these distributors,” said Dan Erlij, partner at United Talent Agency and co-head of the television literary department. “There’s so much stuff that’s constantly premiering. How do you make sure that people are aware of it? Bus ads and billboards only take you so far. And it’s expensive. So if you know that there’s a word of mouth built in already, I think that can be really helpful.”The executive producer of “Ten Percent” is John Morton, best known for his comedy “W1A,” which satirizes the BBC. In a recent interview, he said he was cognizant of the high stakes he was facing when he took the job of adapting the beloved series. Attracted to the show’s “warm heart” and its ability to connect its audience to its fallible main characters, Mr. Morton said, he was intimidated by the idea of “starting again with something that’s already so good.”His strategy was to go back and rewatch the first season of “Call My Agent!” in its entirety but then never refer to it again. As of the interview, he had yet to finish the third season and hadn’t watched the fourth.The ultimate goal was to take the essence of “Call My Agent!” and make it specifically British, capturing the diversity of London, from its architecture to its people.“London is chaotic — architecturally, logistically, creatively — and that throws up wonderful things and also terrible things,” Mr. Morton said, adding that, as in “Call My Agent!,” the talent agency has a rooftop. But rather than looking out over a pristine Parisian night sky, this roof “looks out over a certain sort of unconnected chimneys.”The cast of the British version is also more diverse, with the secret daughter from the original now played by the British actress Hiftu Quasem, who is of Bengali descent, and the bumbling agent, Dan, portrayed by Prasanna Puwanarajah, a British actor of Sri Lankan descent. Yet the archetypes from the original prevail. For example, Ms. Cottin’s character, a hard-charging lesbian agent, is now played by Lydia Leonard, and her character’s frenetic love life is also complicated by her career ambitions.Mr. Davoli — who since becoming the head of Bron TV has sold three other co-productions to streaming companies, including “The Defeated” to Netflix and “Kin” to AMC — admits that the market for format deals has become more challenged in recent years.“The thing that’s most important that I’ve learned over the last four years is the quality bar cannot be messed with,” he said. “The only way to protect the investment is to ensure that you’re creatively making content that can sell into the U.S., because our audiences are so sophisticated now. They won’t stick around for stuff that’s not rising above a certain bar.” More

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      in Music

      Harrison Birtwistle, Fiercely Modernist Composer, Dies at 87

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      His labyrinthine, theatrical works placed him in the first rank of 20th-century English composers, though his music was often tagged as “difficult.”Harrison Birtwistle, whose intensely theatrical compositions and uncompromising modernism made him the most prominent British composer since Benjamin Britten, died on Monday at his home in Mere, England. He was 87.His death was announced by a spokesman for his music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes.Mr. Birtwistle’s granitic, earthy works revealed their secrets slowly, and their structures were labyrinthine. Dissonant, weighty and to some ears forbidding, they often dwelled on similar themes from piece to piece, interrogating kindred ideas from different angles, developing ideas touched on earlier.“I can only do one thing, and there is nothing else,” Mr. Birtwistle, who was active mainly in Europe, said in 1999.What Mr. Birtwistle did, however, he did in a unique style of indelible permanence. Reviewing “The Shadow of Night,” the critic Paul Griffiths wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that that orchestral work was “like all its predecessors: something strikingly new but heavy with echoes from the past and, indeed, the future.”“This is music made to speak now, authoritatively,” he added, “and (like little else in our time) made to last.”Myth provided much of Mr. Birtwistle’s subject material. In “Gawain,” which was given its premiere at the Royal Opera House in 1991, the legend was Arthurian. Greek sources wove a more constant thread, from instrumental works that borrowed ancient structures like the early “Tragoedia” (1965), to his most successful operas: “The Mask of Orpheus,” a massively complex expansion of the tale that won the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize in 1987, and “The Minotaur,” an unsparingly graphic work with baying crowds and a rape scene; it had its premiere at Covent Garden in 2008.“Birtwistle’s score is relentlessly modernistic, its astringency serving to underscore the opera’s violence and unremitting tension,” the critic George Loomis wrote in The International Herald Tribune.“One did not expect this crusty composer to turn mellow at 73, and he has not done so,” Mr. Loomis continued, adding that “this is not music from which one derives much sheer pleasure, but it is intently theatrical.”Mr. Birtwistle’s interests were always primarily in drama and form, whether writing for the opera house or the concert hall. His compositions tended to be deeply ritualistic, as blocks of material were etched and etched again in sounds dominated by woodwind, brass and percussion.Orchestral players were sometimes treated as if they were akin to characters in a theater. In such works as “Verses for Ensembles” (1969), “Secret Theatre” (1984) and “Cortege” (2007), instrumentalists played musical and dramatic roles, moving between ensembles and around the stage. The moving “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” (2009-10) engaged the soloist Christian Tetzlaff in a series of duets with individual players, dissecting and reforming the genre even while extending it.Mr. Birtwistle was inescapably an English composer, taking inspiration from distant predecessors, such as the Renaissance musician John Dowland, and incorporating even old techniques like the medieval hocket. He had no time for the pastorals of more recent forerunners like Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose influence on his earliest works was quickly abandoned.Mr. Birtwistle delved instead into the more harrowing side of nature, as in his unearthly “The Moth Requiem” (2012) for female voices, and the volcanic “Earth Dances” (1986), a vast score that divided the orchestra into six bubbling, geological “strata” of instruments, each erupting over separate time scales. It was often compared to Stravinsky’s classic “Rite of Spring.”“You can find Birtwistle’s music ‘difficult’ or not, or like one piece more than another,” the composer Oliver Knussen said in “Wild Tracks,” a diary of conversations between Mr. Birtwistle and the journalist Fiona Maddocks. “But it seems to me that you can’t be indifferent to it. And that’s the mark of a great artist, I think.”Mr. Birtwhistle, right, with the Hungarian conductor Péter Eötvös in London in 1988. Some performances of his work drew heckling.Neil Libbert/Camera Press LondonHarrison Birtwistle was born on July 15, 1934, in the mill town of Accrington, England, north of Manchester. He was the only child of Fred and Madge (Harrison) Birtwistle, who together ran a bakery.Harry, as Mr. Birtwistle was universally known, trained not as a composer but as a clarinetist, taking up the instrument at age 7 and first playing in the local military band and in small theaters. At the Royal Manchester College of Music, which he entered in 1952, he played clarinet in small contemporary music ensembles, some of the work written by his fellow students his fellow students Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, who went onto significant careers of their own.The gritty urbanism and industrial brass of Mr. Birtwistle’s youth drew him to sounds he heard in avant-gardists like Stravinsky and Varèse, Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, who all became strong influences. (Mr. Boulez himself later conducted and recorded many of Birtwistle’s works.) But few of Mr. Birtwistle’s own early pieces survive, and his first published composition, “Refrains and Choruses,” was not given its premiere until 1959.After national service, for which he played in the band of the Royal Artillery from 1955 to 1957, Mr. Birtwistle took teaching jobs while continuing to compose. His breakthrough came in 1965, with the premiere of “Tragoedia” and the awarding of a Harkness Fellowship to study in the United States. As a visiting fellow at Princeton University he completed “Punch and Judy,” a murderous operatic take on puppet shows that premiered at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival in England. Britten, who died in 1976, reportedly left halfway through.Following spells teaching at Swarthmore and the State University of New York at Buffalo — the latter at the invitation of the composer Morton Feldman — Mr. Birtwistle was appointed the music director of the National Theater in London from 1975 to 1983. His scores for “Hamlet,” “Volpone” and Peter Hall’s production of the “Oresteia,” among other plays, were lost.Mr. Birtwistle cemented his reputation in the 1980s with an extraordinary series of scores that included the orchestral “Secret Theatre” and “Earth Dances” as well as “The Mask of Orpheus,” a four-hour masterpiece with a libretto by Peter Zinovieff. It was so elaborate that it took its composer more than a decade to write.“For Mr. Birtwistle, there is no ‘main action,’” John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote after the premiere of “Orpheus” at the English National Opera in 1986. “He has deliberately thwarted the narrative flow, or even the epic progression, of normal opera in favor of a dizzying montage of flashbacks, repetitions, reconsiderations and parallel actions.”The music was “unrelentingly dense and driven” on a first hearing, Mr. Rockwell added. “But if one allows oneself to start accepting the opera’s gnomic conventions, its earnest search for the underlying truth behind our culture’s notions of music, poetry, sex, love and death take on an undeniable power.”Mr. Birtwistle’s work was always controversial. His “grim, raw, amorphous soundscapes make few concessions to narrow ears,” as the critic Alex Ross wrote in 1995. For the 1994 revival of “Gawain” at Covent Garden, two antimodernist composers coordinated a heckling campaign against what one called Mr. Birtwistle’s “sonic sewage.”The following year, “Panic,” a raucous work for saxophone, drum kit and orchestra, was featured in the Last Night of the Proms. Its appearance in that traditionally jingoistic ceremony caused some in the press and the public to sputter with rage.“I was treading on a sacred cow and the attendant manure,” Mr. Birtwistle later joked. He denied that his music was all that difficult, and refused the premise of questions about the accessibility of his compositions. “Panic,” he laughed, was “the nearest piece I’ve got to fun!”Mr. Birtwistle, who was knighted in 1988, married Sheila Duff in 1959. She died in 2012. He is survived by three sons, Adam, Silas and Toby, and six grandchildren.Asked by Ms. Maddocks in 2013 whether there was a continuity in his life from his childhood to his years as a composer, Mr. Birtwistle, whose gruff public persona hid a warm and witty personality, said that he had “achieved much more than I ever imagined.”“I’ve never felt I had ambitions for myself, only for my idea, and for it materializing into something worthwhile,” he added, laughing.“But I’m still here, still trying. And I’m still exactly the same.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      June Brown, a Mainstay of Britain’s ‘EastEnders,’ Dies at 95

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      As the memorable Dot Cotton, she appeared in thousands of episodes of the hugely popular soap opera over 35 years.June Brown, who appeared in thousands of episodes of the British soap opera “EastEnders” across 35 years, portraying Dot Cotton, one of the more memorable residents of the fictional Albert Square, died on Sunday at her home in Surrey, near London. She was 95.Her death was announced on the show’s Twitter account. In one of many tributes shared by that account, Natalie Cassidy, another star of the show, called Ms. Brown “the best character actress ‘EastEnders’ has ever seen or will ever see.”Ms. Brown was classically trained at the Old Vic drama school and had a decent career in the theater until she and her second husband, Robert Arnold, whom she married in 1958, began having their six children.“Touring was difficult with children,” she told The Daily Telegraph of London in 1995, “so I did a great deal of television work. And, in 1985, ‘EastEnders’ and Dot came along.”Dot was the mother of the villainous Nick Cotton. Ms. Brown was originally contracted for three months.“Then I was asked if I wanted to be a permanent character,” she told The Express of Britain in 2020, the year her character was finally written out of the series. “I had no idea it was going to be for 30-odd years.”Ms. Brown, left, in an episode of “EastEnders” with, from left, Wendy Richard, Ian Lavender, James Alexandro and Natalie Cassidy. AFP/Getty ImagesIt turned out that audiences found Dot, a chain-smoking bundle of prejudices, oddly endearing. The Daily Telegraph, in the 1995 article, called her “the holy-rolling hypochondriac, one-woman moral majority of Albert Square.”Ms. Brown enjoyed creating a flawed character — so much so that in 1993, after playing Dot for eight years, she left the show when she felt the writers were dialing back some of Dot’s more objectionable characteristics.“In the early days Dot was a terrible racist,” Ms. Brown explained in the 1995 interview. “But she gradually became more and more politically correct, which was disastrous for the character and the program. It’s no good having a program that is supposed to reflect society but covers it all up and pretends that everything in the garden is lovely.”She returned in 1997. As the years rolled by, Dot continued to change, becoming less gossipy and more like the fictional world’s matriarch, and Ms. Brown was given some meaty story lines — a request from a friend for Dot’s help with euthanasia, for instance, and Nick’s death from a heroin overdose.A much-praised episode in 2008 was devoted solely to Ms. Brown, as Dot made a 30-minute tape recording for her comatose husband. The Observer called it “an absolutely brilliant 30 minutes of prime time — beautifully written, economically directed and faultlessly, movingly performed by June Brown.”Ms. Brown recently dealt with macular degeneration in real life, something that was incorporated into scripts. The character disappeared in 2020 without much fanfare — Dot moved to Ireland. The show’s producers said a return was always possible, but Ms. Brown wasn’t interested. “I’ve sent her off to Ireland and that’s where she’ll stay,” she said of Dot.In 2001, Ms. Brown and her fellow cast member Barbara Windsor were visited on the set of “EastEnders” by Queen Elizabeth II.Pool photo by Fiona Hanson“EastEnders” Twitter posts said she had appeared in 2,884 episodes.“There was nobody quite like June Brown,” Nadine Dorries, Britain’s culture minister, said on Twitter. “She captured the zeitgeist of British culture like no other in her many years on our screens.”June Muriel Brown was born on Feb. 16, 1927, in Suffolk, England, to Henry and Louisa (Butler) Brown. Her father owned an electrical engineering company, and her mother worked in a milliner’s shop.Ms. Brown’s childhood was marked by loss. A brother died in infancy. She was particularly close to an older sister, Marise, who died of an ear infection when June was 7, an event that affected her more deeply than her parents seemed to realize.“People weren’t concerned with psychology then,” Ms. Brown wrote in her autobiography, “Before the Year Dot” (2013). “Perhaps it was better because you learnt to survive without sympathy.”Ms. Brown grew up in Ipswich. A career in acting was not at all on her mind.“I once played the Virgin Mary at school,” she told The Daily Telegraph, “but only because my teacher thought I’d look lovely in blue.”During World War II she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service — the Wrens — where one of her jobs was showing training films to airmen. She also performed in a touring revue that performed for troops.“We took it ’round the Southern Command area and I really enjoyed it,” she told The Independent in 2010. “I got laughs, and that was when the bug got me.”After the war she studied at the Old Vic and began appearing in plays. By the late 1950s she was turning up in roles on “ITV Television Playhouse” and similar TV programs. In the early 1970s she appeared in several episodes of “Coronation Street,” another long-running British soap.She credited Leslie Grantham, an original “EastEnders” cast member, with suggesting her for the role of Dot.“He’d seen me in an episode of ‘Minder,’” another British show, she told The Daily Mirror in 2003. “I’ll always be grateful to him.”A few dozen episodes into the series, Dot made her first appearance. At the 2005 British Soap Awards, Ms. Brown received a lifetime achievement honor for her work on the show. “EastEnders” has also been seen on various outlets in the United States for years.In 1950 Ms. Brown married John Garley, a fellow actor, who died in 1957. Her second husband, Mr. Arnold, also an actor, died in 2003. Her survivors include five children, Chloe, Naomi, Sophie, Louise and William. More