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      Eleonore Von Trapp Campbell, of the ‘Sound of Music’ Family, Dies at 90

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      She was a member of the Trapp Family Singers, which toured internationally, though she herself was not depicted in the musical or the film.Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, the second daughter of Maria von Trapp, whose Austrian family was depicted in the stage musical and the beloved movie “The Sound of Music,” died on Sunday in Northfield, Vt. She was 90.The death was confirmed by Day Funeral Home in Randolph, Vt.Ms. Campbell was a younger half sister to the von Trapp children who were depicted in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music” and its hugely successful 1965 movie adaptation. Both were based loosely on a 1949 autobiographical book by Maria von Trapp, who died in 1987.“The Sound of Music” tells the story of an Austrian governess (played by Julie Andrews in the film) who marries her employer, a widower (Christopher Plummer in the film), and then teaches his seven children music. The movie won the Academy Award for best picture.Ms. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Ms. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.“The life of singing on tour is one that involves an extraordinary amount of discipline and hard work,” Ms. Campbell’s daughter Elizabeth Peters said, “and my mother lived as a teenager singing lead soprano, night after night after night, and toured much of the year, and it really shaped who she was.”Ms. Campbell stopped touring in 1954 when she married Hugh David Campbell, a coach and teacher. They lived in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where she raised seven daughters, teaching them to cook, bake, garden, sew, knit, darn and make butter and ice cream from scratch. In 1975, the family moved to Waitsfield, Vt.Later in life she traveled to festivals with her instruments and told children about her music career.Eleonore von Trapp, who went by Lorli, was born on May 14, 1931, in Salzburg, Austria, on the border of Germany. After fleeing the country, her family settled in Vermont in the early 1940s and opened a ski lodge in Stowe, where Ms. Campbell’s two surviving siblings, Johannes and Rosmarie von Trapp, live.In 1996 the family became engaged in a bitter dispute over money and control of the lodge, a 93-room Austrian-style resort on 2,200 acres. Johannes and several siblings bought out the others in 1995; Ms. Campbell and the rest said their shares were worth more than the price they had received.“He acts as though I’m the chief instigator, and I’m not,” Ms. Campbell told Vanity Fair in 1998, speaking of her brother. “I’m sad at the situation, which was completely unnecessary.”In addition to her two siblings and Ms. Peters, Ms. Campbell’s survivors include five other daughters, 18 grandchildren and six great-grandsons.One daughter, Hope McAndrew, said that while she and her siblings knew every word from “The Sound of Music” as they were growing up, they also knew the songs the Trapp Family Singers had sung on tour long before the musical.The New York Times contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      Quel est votre meilleur souvenir d’Abba?

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      Le mois prochain, le groupe suédois sort son premier album depuis 40 ans. Comment leur musique a-t-elle compté pour vous? Envoyez-nous vos témoignages.De gauche à droite: Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Agnetha Faltskog et Bjorn Ulvaeus, les membres du groupe Abba.Tt News Agency/ReutersQuel est votre premier souvenir d’Abba ?Depuis “Waterloo” et son irruption spectaculaire sur la scène internationale en 1974, le groupe occupe une place incontournable dans la pop mondiale.Jusqu’à 1982 et sa mise en retrait pour une durée indéterminée, Abba — nommé d’après ses membres Agnetha Faltskog, Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus et Anni-Frid Lyngstad — a produit huit albums studio et quelques-uns des tubes les plus accrocheurs de l’histoire, numéros 1 des classements mondiaux. “Dancing Queen”, “Take a Chance on Me”, “Mamma Mia”: l’évocation de leurs noms suffit à vous mettre d’humeur joyeuse une bonne partie de la journée (il n’y a pas de quoi!).Le succès du phénomène Abba ne s’est jamais tari : En 1999, la comédie musicale “Mamma Mia!” conquiert d’abord le West End à Londres, puis Broadway avant de se propager aux théâtres d’Europe. Et son adaptation au cinéma affiche deux grandes stars de Hollywood.Après 40 ans de silence, le groupe a sorti de nouveaux morceaux et, le 5 novembre, lancera un album de 10 titres, “Voyage”. À partir du printemps prochain, dans un théâtre conçu sur-mesure à Londres, le groupe se produira en ‘live’ sous forme d’avatars high-tech de leur apparence en 1979.Si la musique d’Abba n’a jamais disparu, c’est un véritable retour que fait le groupe le plus vendeur de Suède. Pour célébrer l’événement, nous aimerions savoir ce qu’Abba signifie pour vous.Leurs tubes ont-ils été la bande-son de votre vie ? À quels moments de joie, de tristesse ou de tubes chantés à tue-tête vous ramènent-ils ? Avez-vous visité le musée Abba à Stockholm ? Comment votre ressenti des différents titres a-t-il évolué au fil du temps ? Nous aimerions aussi voir, si vous en avez, vos photos de fan d’Abba.Certaines de vos contributions seront incluses dans nos reportages à venir sur Abba.Que représente pour vous la musique d’Abba? Le quatuor suédois sort son premier album depuis 40 ans. Nous aimerions savoir ce qu’en pensent ses fans. More

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      in Music

      Mary Lattimore: Has Harp, Must Travel

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      As a child, she learned she could play her instrument almost anywhere. As an adult, her bittersweet music depends on doing exactly that.Mary Lattimore made her public harp debut in an Arby’s parking lot.Her mother, Lelia Hall Lattimore, thought they might be late for her teenage daughter’s recital the moment they left their small North Carolina town for the state’s largest city, Charlotte. When a tire blew, she knew they were doomed. As they fished the harp from the trunk to retrieve the spare, Lelia had an idea: Why didn’t Mary play right there?As Mary began to pluck 47 strings in her new floral-print dress, customers abandoned roast beef sandwiches. The tow-truck driver, Angel, marveled. Most customers had never heard a harp live, let alone in a fast-food parking lot.“I stepped out of my bratty teenager self and went for it. I was able to see the comedy, because playing the harp is fun,” Lattimore said by phone from her Los Angeles apartment, as her cat, Jenny, meowed to be let inside the studio where the harp lives. She announced the last word with a relish that suggested the Renaissance staple is rarely described as such. “I love playing for people who have never seen a harp, who think it’s a museum piece. I want people to feel like they can approach it.”During the last decade, Lattimore has been at the fore of a surprising but steady harp uprising, with upstarts like Brandee Younger re-energizing it in jazz and Sissi Rada slipping it inside techno. She delights in unfamiliar audiences who first see her instrument as a novelty. But Lattimore handles her harp like a solo guitarist, improvising around contemplative melodies with the help of pedals that warp her crystalline tone and seem to bend time.She has recorded with Kurt Vile, toured with Thurston Moore and taught Kesha how to hold the harp. More important, though, are Lattimore’s beguiling solo albums, bittersweet chronicles of her travels with an instrument she called “my friend.” Her latest anthology, “Collected Pieces II,” includes a hymn for an orphaned deer she encountered during an artist residency on a 20,000-acre Wyoming cattle ranch and a paean for a cluster of seaside Croatian pines.“Even if you’re just being quiet in a new place, there’s a sense of forward motion. You get addicted to that newness,” Lattimore said. “These songs are a way of remembering those places, a souvenir of my feelings.”Lattimore was born into a very different harp tradition. Her mother played in orchestras and entertained at weddings while teaching two dozen students. Mary insists that the harp’s vibrating body, pushed against her pregnant mother’s stomach, was her first influence.Lelia said she was a fastidious technician, “because if the note isn’t right, it’s wrong.” As the preteen Mary transitioned from piano rehearsals to harp recitals, her mother recognized that her daughter wasn’t motivated by such strictures. Mary loved the Cure and belonged to the R.E.M. fan club. The instrument’s precision induced so much anxiety that Mary took beta blockers before recitals. To shield their relationship, Lelia drove her daughter to lessons in nearby cities instead of being Mary’s teacher. “It was an adventure,” Lelia said in a phone interview, “our time together.”“It’s very vulnerable to improvise, especially on an instrument so big and rare. You’re showing your guts,” Lattimore said.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesThat link between motion and music stuck. Though Lattimore earned a scholarship to the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., she envied the skateboarders beneath her rehearsal room window, the élan of their escapades. She studied abroad in Vienna and Milan, an aberration for anyone with access to Eastman’s resources.When Lattimore moved to Philadelphia after college, a vibrant network of young experimental musicians indoctrinated her in improvisation. She had always struggled to memorize elaborate classical pieces, so the idiom offered an escape hatch. She no longer memorized; she responded, her chops flourishing without charts.“It’s very vulnerable to improvise, especially on an instrument so big and rare. You’re showing your guts,” she said. “But those people taught me to trust my instincts.”While furtively writing her own material, Lattimore began touring and recording with rock bands. In 2014, she was anonymously nominated for a Pew Fellowship, an annual $60,000 prize for a dozen Philadelphia artists. The call to tell her she’d won, she said, remains “the greatest thing in my life.” Lattimore paused a string of minimum-wage jobs and plopped half the money into the bank. She turned her battered Volvo westward, she and her harp bound for a Los Angeles rental.Stopping in national parks and idiosyncratic towns, she wrote what became her 2016 album “At the Dam.” Lattimore recognized that being in motion shook loose strands of inspiration, moods she wanted to express with melody. She needed, then, to remain on the go.In January 2018, Lattimore relocated to California, soon landing a residency at the Headland Center for the Arts just west of the Golden Gate Bridge. Inside a studio built from redwoods, the ocean always audible, she composed her 2018 breakthrough, “Hundreds of Days,” and a duo record with Meg Baird, a songwriter and friend who had decamped from Philadelphia years earlier.“Mary had really passionate ideas about music, but she didn’t want them to involve tedium,” Baird said by phone. “She always wanted to place the harp into a context where it wasn’t treated like precious furniture.”Lattimore calls her harp “my giant 85-pound sculpture.”Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesLattimore’s dual volumes of “Collected Pieces” testify to that dynamic. “It Was Late and We Watched the Motel Burn,” written after doing just that from a tour-van window, is vertiginous and unsettling, the melody constantly swallowing itself. “For Scott Kelly, Returned to Earth,” inspired by the astronaut (and composed when Lattimore’s jaw was wired shut after a fall), is delicate and empathetic, a tender transmission between altered realities.Lattimore tours so much she has churned through three used Volvo XC90s (the model that holds a harp) in seven years. After Covid-19 scuttled her itinerary, she longed for the daily invigoration of that travel, the surprises that shape her music. She found a temporary fix through collaborations.The guitarist Steve Gunn remembered her desperation to jam when he was recording his new album, “Other You,” in Los Angeles during lockdown. She hesitated to visit. When she finally arrived on the last day, they cut the instrumental “Sugar Kiss.” It sounds like a group hug during a cataclysm. “I don’t think she’d been out of her house, and we were all struggling,” Gunn said from Belgium. “You just want to be around Mary, so it was a nice way to step into hanging out.”Lattimore went on to record an album of discursive duets with her neighbor in Los Angeles, the fellow Philadelphia expatriate Paul Sukeena, and two luminous drones with the instrumental duo Growing. Their baptisms-by-volume had once coaxed her toward experimental music; making them now helped her survive isolation. “I lost myself during Covid, just dead inside,” she said. “These were the sparks I found.”Lattimore is slowly returning to motion. In September, she visited Croatia for her birthday. Rather than lug her harp, she took a keyboard, savoring Adriatic vistas while composing her first film score. A week after returning to Los Angeles, she drove to an artist residency in Marfa, Texas.The scores, the residencies, the keyboards: They are concessions to age, since she cannot haul what she dubbed “my giant 85-pound sculpture” around the world forever. Her parents have both endured hip replacements after decades of moving harps. But during the 14-hour haul from Marfa to California, she realized how much she had pined for the peripatetic thrills of touring — she and the harp, seeking the joys of the open road, en route to anywhere.“The moon is shining on the desert. There are no cars. You are just listening,” Lattimore said, her pitch rising. “I had missed that so much, even gas station bathrooms. I like who I am when I am traveling. You are drinking in something you need.” More

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      in Movies

      How Hans Zimmer Conjured the Otherworldly Sounds of ‘Dune’

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      The composer worked with a far-flung “band” of collaborators who sung, scraped metal, invented instruments and more for the score.When the composer Hans Zimmer was approached to score “Dune,” the new movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel, he knew one thing absolutely: It would not sound like “Star Wars.” Musically, those films drew on influences that ranged from Holst and Stravinsky to classic movie scores of the ’30s and ’40s. Even the rollicking tune performed by the bug-eyed creatures in the Cantina was inspired by Benny Goodman.For “Dune,” by contrast, Zimmer wanted to conjure sounds that nobody had ever heard before.“I felt like there was a freedom to get away from a Western orchestra,” he said recently, speaking in the Warner Bros. offices overlooking Hudson Yards in New York. “I can spend days making up sounds.”The resulting soundtrack might be one of Zimmer’s most unorthodox and most provocative. Along with synthesizers, you can hear scraping metal, Indian bamboo flutes, Irish whistles, a juddering drum phrase that Zimmer calls an “anti-groove,” seismic rumbles of distorted guitar, a war horn that is actually a cello and singing that defies Western musical notation — just to name a few of its disparate elements.The score combines the gigantic, chest-thumping sound of Zimmer’s best known work of the last decade with the spirit of radical sonic experimentation. The weirdness is entirely befitting the saga of a futuristic, intergalactic civilization whose denizens are stalked by giant sandworms and revere a hallucinogenic substance called spice.Timothée Chalamet stars in the latest film version of ‘Dune,’ directed by Denis Villeneuve.Warner Bros.No hallucinogens were imbibed as part of the composing process though: “Weirdly, I’m the only rock ’n’ roller who never did any drugs,” said Zimmer, who has a wide, boyish grin that belies his 64 years, particularly when discussing his more outrageous musical endeavors.Some time after his stint with the band the Buggles, the German-born, California-based composer made his name with scores for “Rain Man,” “The Lion King” and “The Thin Red Line.” More recently he scored the latest Bond outing, “No Time to Die.” But to many he is perhaps best known for his work on Christopher Nolan movies, including “Interstellar,” “Inception” and his Batman series.In fact, Zimmer turned down an offer to work on Nolan’s last film, “Tenet,” to focus his energies on “Dune.” In a way, the composer said, he has been working on this soundtrack ever since he first read the novel as a teenager. “I’ve been thinking about ‘Dune’ for nearly 50 years. So I took it very seriously.” He avoided seeing the 1984 movie adaptation, directed by David Lynch — featuring music by Toto — to preserve the vision of the movie in his head.As part of his creative process, Zimmer spent a week in Utah tuning in to the sound of the desert. “I wanted to hear the wind howling,” he said.Zimmer’s score is so prominent in “Dune” that at times the movie feels like an otherworldly equivalent of a “Planet Earth”-style nature spectacular. “‘Dune’ is by far my most musical film,” said the director Denis Villeneuve, who also hired Zimmer for “Blade Runner 2049.” “The score is almost ubiquitous, participating directly in the narrative of the film. It’s spiritual.”In fact, Zimmer wrote more music than could fit in the film. In addition to the original soundtrack, there’s “The Dune Sketchbook (Music From the Soundtrack),” comprising extended sonic explorations, and “The Art and Soul of Dune,” a companion soundtrack to the book of the same title that goes behind the scenes of the film. (There’s still more written for the hoped-for sequel.)It’s Zimmer’s name in the credits and on the soundtrack releases, but he prefers to think of himself as a member of an unusual band that includes a select group of composer-collaborators: “If someone has a great idea, I’m the first one to say, yes. Let’s go on that adventure.”The composer David Fleming, who gets an “additional music” credit for his contributions to the score, explained, “We create and collaborate on ideas, experimenting as long as the filmmakers will allow us to before we finally start applying those ideas to picture.” He described “band meetings” as an open forum, adding, “More than anyone else, you can count on Hans to push a bold idea one step further than you think it could possibly go, and then push some more.”Guthrie Govan, a slide guitarist whom Zimmer discovered on YouTube, described the process: “He’ll outline the desired end result rather than prescribing a specific means of getting there. For one cue, he just said, ‘This needs to sound like sand.’”To create the unorthodox score, Zimmer gave his collaborators cues like “This needs to sound like sand.”Warner Bros.Entirely new instruments ended up being created from scratch. (With pandemic-era travel restrictions in place, many of these elements were recorded separately in different parts of the world.) Winds player Pedro Eustache built a 21-foot horn and a “contrabass duduk,” a supersized version of the ancient Armenian woodwind instrument. Chas Smith, working in isolation in his barn in rural California, struck, scraped and scratched various metallic instruments of his own invention, including one made from springs and saw blades, and another made of Inconel 718, a superalloy used in cryogenic storage tanks and SpaceX engines. In the film, Smith’s complex, resonant tonal textures accompany visuals of desert sands and windblown spice.One of the major and more surprising musical moments in “Dune” occurs during a ceremonious arrival on the desert planet Arrakis. The scene is announced with the portentous drone of bagpipes, an aural assault generated by a battalion of 30 highland pipers playing in a converted church in Scotland. Ear protection had to be worn: the volume reached 130 decibels, the equivalent of an air-raid siren..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}That unholy din in particular permeated Zimmer’s home during his late-night work sessions. “My daughter told me the other day she has bagpipe PTSD.”But perhaps the most mystical presence in the score is a choir of female voices, singing, whispering and chanting in an invented language. “The true driving force of this novel is always the female characters,” Zimmer said. “It’s really the women that craft the destiny of everybody.”One arresting voice comes through like a war cry, all ancient, melismatic syllables in unsettled rhythms. These vocals were recorded in a closet in Brooklyn, the makeshift studio of the music therapist and singer Loire Cotler. In that space, sitting on the floor, with clothes dangling above her head and her laptop perched on a cardboard box, Cotler sang for hours a day, emerging when it was dark. “It became a sacred musical laboratory,” Cotler told me.Stylistically, Cotler drew on everything from Jewish niggun (wordless song) to South Indian vocal percussion, Celtic lament to Tuvan overtone singing. Even the sound of John Coltrane’s saxophone was an influence, she said. “When you start to hybridize these far-flung influences and techniques, interesting sounds start to happen,” she said. “It’s a vocal technique called ‘Hans Zimmer.’”Villeneuve has made headlines for insisting that “Dune” is the kind of multisensory experience that demands to be seen on a big screen in a cinema. In the same way, Zimmer’s score is one that demands to be experienced via a good cinema sound system.“I write in surround sound — but it’s not just about the big sound and big screen,” Zimmer said. “It’s about sharing something together. Shared dreaming.” More

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      in Music

      Li Yundi Is Detained in China on Suspicion of Prostitution

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      Li Yundi, a famous performer, was accused of soliciting a woman, state news outlets said. Officials often use such accusations against their enemies.A prominent Chinese pianist, Li Yundi, has been detained on prostitution suspicion in Beijing, state-run news outlets in China reported on Thursday.Mr. Li, 39, who had gained celebrity in China as a performer and a reality television personality, was accused of soliciting a 29-year-old woman, according to People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party.The authorities in Beijing did not provide many details of the incident, saying in a statement that a 39-year-old man with the last name Li had acknowledged wrongdoing and had been detained “in accordance with the law.”In an apparent reference to Mr. Li’s case, the Beijing authorities later posted a photo of piano keys alongside the text: “The world is not simply black and white, but one must distinguish between black and white. It must never be mistaken.”The Chinese government often uses accusations of prostitution to intimidate political enemies, and it was unclear why Mr. Li had been singled out and what punishment he might face. Mr. Li and his representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Reports of Mr. Li’s detention quickly became one of the most widely discussed topics on the Chinese internet, with hundreds of thousands of people weighing in. Many expressed shock at the detention of Mr. Li, who rose to fame after becoming one of the youngest people to win the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2000, when he was 18.“He has accumulated popularity for many years, and now it has been ruined after 20 or 30 years of hard work,” wrote one user on Weibo, a Twitterlike Chinese site.Under China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, the government has taken a tough line on artists and has led efforts to “purify” the country’s cultural environment, often in pursuit of political goals. The authorities have in recent months tried to rein in China’s raucous celebrity culture, warning about the perils of celebrity worship and fan clubs.Mr. Li, who has more than 20 million followers on Weibo, is a regular guest on the annual Lunar New Year gala on Chinese television, which is watched by hundreds of millions of people. This year, he performed “I Love You China,” a patriotic song.He rose to fame as a pianist and in the West is sometimes called only by his given name, Yundi. But in China he has become known more recently for his work on reality shows, including “Call Me By Fire,” in which male celebrities compete to form a performance group. Several episodes of the show were removed from the Chinese internet on Thursday after news of Mr. Li’s detention spread.Chinese commentators pointed to the case as an example of a lack of ethics among artists.“No matter how skilled he is, he will not be able to convey his sadness through performance once his image is damaged,” People’s Daily wrote in a social media post. “There can only be a future by advocating morality and abiding by the law.”The Chinese government has a history of using charges of prostitution to sideline political enemies, and experts said Mr. Li’s detention should be looked at critically.Jerome A. Cohen, a New York University law professor who specializes in the Chinese legal system, said the lack of transparency about his case was troubling.“Can one be confident that the facts alleged are true?” Professor Cohen said. “Prostitution is such a time-honored Communist Party claim against political opponents that one has to be suspicious of this case.”Claire Fu More

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      in Movies

      Leslie Bricusse, Prolific Songwriter for Stage and Screen, Dies at 90

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      His songs from “Stop the World,” “Willy Wonka,” “Goldfinger” and other shows and movies became hits for a range of performers.Leslie Bricusse, a composer and lyricist who contributed to Broadway hits like “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off” and “Jekyll & Hyde” and popular films like “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and “Goldfinger,” died on Tuesday. He was 90.The BBC said his agent had confirmed his death. News accounts said he died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, where he had a home.Mr. Bricusse’s songs, many written with the actor and singer Anthony Newley or other partners, were recorded by a vast range of vocalists. Among the first was Sammy Davis Jr., who, when performing in London in 1961, saw the Newley-Bricusse show “Stop the World,” which had just opened in the West End, and became an ardent fan. He garnered a Top 20 hit in America in 1962 with his version of a song from that show, “What Kind of Fool Am I?”A decade later Mr. Davis would take Mr. Newley and Mr. Bricusse (pronounced BRICK-us) to the top of the charts when he recorded a largely unnoticed song from the film musical “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” with the Mike Curb Congregation. (The film had been released the previous year to negative reviews.) The song was “The Candy Man,” and it reached No. 1 on both Billboard’s pop and easy listening singles charts, the biggest hit of Mr. Davis’s long career.Another song from “Willy Wonka,” “Pure Imagination,” has been recorded by numerous artists, among them Josh Groban, Maroon 5 and Barbra Streisand. Shirley Bassey had a Top 10 hit in 1965 with “Goldfinger,” the title song from the 1964 James Bond movie, for which Mr. Bricusse and Mr. Newley wrote the lyrics to John Barry’s melody. Another Bond film, “You Only Live Twice,” featured a title song by Mr. Barry and Mr. Bricusse that was sung by Nancy Sinatra and recorded later by many others.One of Mr. Bricusse’s biggest, and earliest, hits in his native England was a song that some listeners may not have even realized he had a hand in: “My Old Man’s a Dustman,” a chart-topping novelty number recorded by Lonnie Donegan in 1960. Mr. Bricusse wrote it with Mr. Donegan and Peter Buchanan but used a pen name, Beverly Thorn, “because I was worried about it being down-market,” as he told The Telegraph of Britain in an interview in January.When Mr. Bricusse published a memoir in 2015, “Pure Imagination: A Sorta-Biography,” one of its several forewords was written by his friend Elton John.“His catalogue of songs is enormous — his achievements endless,” Mr. John wrote. “Anyone who has written ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ and ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ should be revered for ever.”Sean Connery as James Bond on the set of “Goldfinger” (1964). Mr. Bricusse and Mr. Newley wrote the words and John Barry wrote the melody for the movie’s title song.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty ImagesLeslie Bricusse was born on Jan. 29, 1931, in London.“I fell in love with the idea of writing songs when I was a child,” he told The Herald of Glasgow in 2016. “I thought I was going to be a journalist at first, but I gradually fell in love with all these great writers like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, who were at the peak of their powers then. The great thing about them as well was that they were literate, and wrote story songs.”As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, he was active in the drama club Footlights, writing and directing musical comedy shows. Beatrice Lillie, a star of the day known for offbeat musical comedy, saw his work and was impressed, hiring him to be her comic foil in a show she was performing at the Globe Theater, “An Evening With Beatrice Lillie.”“Auntie Bea sort of adopted me,” Mr. Bricusse told The Sunday Express of Britain in 2017.In 1961 he was working for Ms. Lillie when Mr. Newley approached him about collaborating on what became “Stop the World,” a show about an Everyman character named Littlechap and the lessons he learns from birth to death. Mr. Bricusse had free use of Ms. Lillie’s apartment in New York, and Mr. Newley joined him there from England; they wrote the show in four weeks (or, in another telling by Mr. Bricusse, eight days).“We had a nice thing of it in New York,” Mr. Newley told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1961. “Pleasant flat, no one to bother us. It went like cream.”From left, Anna Quayle, Mr. Newley and Susan Baker in the Broadway production of “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off,” the first Bricusse-Newley collaboration.Friedman-AbelesThe show, with Mr. Newley starring, opened at the Palace Theater in Manchester, England, in June 1961 and then hit London, where it caught on, propelled by strong songs like “Gonna Build a Mountain” and “I Wanna Be Rich,” in addition to “What Kind of Fool Am I?” It opened on Broadway in October 1962 and ran there for more than a year.The two men followed that with “The Roar of the Greasepaint — the Smell of the Crowd,” an allegory in revue form about class struggle in which Mr. Newley again starred; it also made Broadway, in 1965. Decades later, Mr. Bricusse had two other Broadway successes: “Victor/Victoria” (1995), for which he wrote the lyrics (as he had done for the 1982 film on which it was based), and “Jekyll & Hyde” (1997), for which he wrote both the lyrics (Frank Wildhorn did the music) and the book. That book earned him a Tony Award nomination, his fifth.He was equally successful in the film world, and not just for songs. He wrote the screenplays as well as the music for “Doctor Dolittle” (1967) and “Scrooge” (1970), among other films. He later adapted both into stage musicals. His song “Talk to the Animals” from “Doctor Dolittle” won him an Oscar, and he shared an Oscar with Henry Mancini for “Victor/Victoria.”Rex Harrison in the title role of “Dr. Dolittle” (1967), for which Mr. Bricusse wrote the screenplay as well as the songs. The best-known song from that score, “Talk to the Animals,” won Mr. Bricusse an Oscar.PhotofestIn an interview this year with NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Mr. Bricusse recalled that when he visited the set during the filming of “Willy Wonka” he was struck by the contrast between the treatment it was receiving and the slick production being filmed on a neighboring soundstage: “Cabaret.”“I was a bit nervous about the amateur style of our show compared with the professionalism of Bob Fosse,” the director of “Cabaret,” he said.The critics, too, found “Willy Wonka” a bit amateurish, but it developed a following over time, especially once it began turning up on television and the music filtered into popular culture.Mr. Davis’s hit version of “The Candy Man” was one of some 60 songs he recorded that Mr. Bricusse wrote or co-wrote. One of Mr. Bricusse’s more recent projects had been a musical about Mr. Davis’s life and career. A version of it was staged at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego in 2009, and Mr. Bricusse had been continuing to refine it.Mr. Bricusse’s survivors include his wife, the actress Yvonne Romain, and a son, Adam.In a 2015 interview with the London publication The Stage, Mr. Bricusse talked about how he and Mr. Newley, who died in 1999, worked.“When I write a song, I hear the music and words at the same time — one suggests the form of the other,” he said. “And Tony was exactly the same. We would sing at each other across the room; it was a very bizarre, unofficial way of writing songs.”He was nonchalant about his ability to work with a wide range of other writers and composers.“I’m a good collaborator: I haven’t ever fallen out with any of them,” he said. “Though there have been one or two tricky ones that I won’t name.” More

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      R. Kelly to Face Another Trial in Chicago, Next August

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      The R&B star was convicted last month in Brooklyn of sex trafficking and racketeering charges after decades of sexual abuse allegations.R. Kelly, the R&B superstar who was convicted last month in Brooklyn on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges, has been scheduled to stand trial again starting on Aug. 1 in Chicago.In this case, Mr. Kelly faces charges that he produced child pornography, enticed children into sex acts and that he and two former employees conspired to fix his 2008 criminal trial in Illinois by paying off witnesses and victims in an effort to get them to change their stories.Judge Harry Leinenweber of U.S. District Court set the date of Mr. Kelly’s trial for three months after he is scheduled to be sentenced in the Brooklyn case, where he faces 10 years to life in prison after a jury found him guilty of all nine counts against him, including eight violations of an anti-sex trafficking law known as the Mann Act. The Chicago trial has been postponed several times because of the pandemic and the Brooklyn case.The federal charges in Chicago came six months after Mr. Kelly, 54, became the focus of scrutiny from law enforcement following the release of the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” which included testimony from several women who accused the singer of abuse dating back to the 1990s.The conviction in Brooklyn was Mr. Kelly’s first criminal punishment despite a long history of sexual abuse allegations.In 2008, Mr. Kelly was tried in Illinois on 14 counts of child pornography and was ultimately acquitted. According to the federal indictment in the Chicago case, which was filed in July 2019, Mr. Kelly and others paid a witness about $170,000 in 2008 to cancel a news conference at which he planned to announce that he possessed video evidence of Mr. Kelly engaging in sex acts with minors. The indictment also alleged that Mr. Kelly instructed his victims to deny to a grand jury a sexual relationship with the singer.Mr. Kelly’s acquittal in 2008 allowed his music career to flourish, and at the trial in Brooklyn, witnesses said his escape from a conviction emboldened him, describing his behavior as increasingly more disturbing in the following years.Mr. Kelly will later face state sex crime charges in Illinois and Minnesota. More

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      Review: Chamber Music Society Returns, Unchanged

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      The organization opened its season with a program encapsulating a persistently conservative vision of the repertory.Out of the crucible of the past year and a half — a brutal pandemic, shuttered theaters, a renewed push for racial justice — major arts institutions have by and large emerged transformed, or at least chastened. Even in the persistently backward-looking classical music realm, there has been a sense of fresh beginnings, of the extension of earlier ventures toward the new and untried.The Metropolitan Opera reopened with its first work by a Black composer. The New York Philharmonic has returned promising premieres and rarities — including, this week, a program of contemporary pieces on which John Adams’s Chamber Symphony, from 1992, is as close to the standard repertory as it gets. Go to Carnegie Hall or the 92nd Street Y, and on any given night you’re likely to hear something other than chestnuts.Then there’s the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.This 52-year-old organization came back on Tuesday with a well played, depressing concert of Beethoven, Hummel, Schubert and Mendelssohn at Alice Tully Hall. Depressing because the program’s blinkered view of music encapsulates what the society has presented for some time — and what’s on the agenda for the rest of its season.Of the nearly 100 works being offered on its main stage at Tully through next spring, just two are by living composers. One of those, George Crumb’s “Ancient Voices of Children,” was written over 50 years ago; the other, Wynton Marsalis’s quartet “At the Octoroon Balls,” in 1995. (And we’ll only get selections from the Marsalis.)Not that programming should be a question of new-music quotas. There are some artists whose main gifts are for astonishing revivals, not premieres. And there is value in providing older but unfamiliar sounds to audiences. The Philharmonic, for example, has already this season presented a Haydn symphony and a Brahms serenade — neither a rarity, but both rarely played by that orchestra.Chamber Music Society, by contrast, rarely ventures off the beaten path, and almost never into work of our time. (It’s true, you don’t often hear Beethoven’s Op. 104 quintet, his arrangement of one of his early trios, which comes in January.) This is particularly frustrating given that the chamber music field is exploding with new work and, relatively inexpensive to present, offers far easier opportunities for experimentation than orchestras or opera companies.Some caveats are in order. The society’s performances are generally of unimpeachable quality. On Tuesday, Beethoven’s Trio in C minor (Op. 9, No. 3) received an airy reading from the violinist Arnaud Sussmann, the violist Matthew Lipman and the cellist Nicholas Canellakis. Hummel’s Piano Quintet in E flat (Op. 87), the least known work on the program, features a double bass instead of a second violin, a witty minuet and a brief, aching slow movement; Lipman, Canellakis, the pianist Wu Qian, the violinist Richard Lin and the bassist Blake Hinson played it stylishly.Wu Qian and Wu Han — who is, with David Finckel, the society’s artistic director — were graceful in Schubert’s Rondo in A for piano, four hands (D. 951). And Wu Han, Lin, Sussmann (now on viola), Lipman, Canellakis and Hinson came together for a warm, lively performance of Mendelssohn’s Op. 110 Sextet in D, with its unusually heavy complement of low strings and its raucous climax.The society has also given stalwart support over the years to rising musicians. It actively streamed while theaters were closed. It honorably paid artists 50 percent of their promised fees after pandemic cancellations, and will add 75 percent more when those dates are rescheduled.And its performances at Tully are not the sum total of its offerings. Its concerts in the Rose Studio nearby seem to come from another universe, one far more contemporary and creative. The first “New Milestones” program of the season there, on Oct. 28, includes works — the oldest from 2008 — by Marcos Balter, Shih-Hui Chen, George Lewis, Alexandre Lunsqui and Nina Shekhar.But there are just a handful of those performances, and the Rose Studio seats only about 100, versus nearly 1,100 in Tully. For the vast majority of the organization’s audience, the Tully season is the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center — and that audience is being handed a profoundly limited product.It feels like kicking an institution when it’s down to criticize it so sharply as it reopens after such a devastating period. But a conservatism extreme even by classical music’s low standards was a problem with the society before the pandemic. That it seems to have viewed the past 19 months not as an opportunity to re-evaluate and reorient, but as a moment to double down, is unfortunate.Chamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterPresents a program of Puccini, Brahms, Webern and Shostakovich on Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; chambermusicsociety.org. More