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    Ira von Fürstenberg, Jet-Setting Princess and Actress, Dies at 83

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    With her aristocratic lineage, high-profile husbands and famous friends, she embodied a chic life of luxury as an international social figure.Ira von Fürstenberg, who came as close as one can get to having it all as an Italian-born princess descended from Charlemagne, an heiress to the Fiat fortune, a Vogue model, a big-screen ingénue and a globe-trotting bon vivant, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Rome. She was 83.Her son, Hubertus von Hohenlohe, said she died after breaking ribs and perforating her lungs in a domestic accident.Blending the gilded privilege of the old-world European aristocracy with the élan of the midcentury film and fashion peerage, Ms. von Fürstenberg seemingly defined the term “jet setter,” bouncing between homes in Rome, London, Paris and Madrid and on Lake Geneva.“My only real home is on airplanes,” she said. “I spend so much time going from country to country that my children suspect that I’m really a flight attendant.”She shared a surname with the renowned fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, who married the princess’s fashion designer brother, Egon, in 1969. “When I first met Egon, she was the famous sister,” Diane told Women’s Wear Daily last month. “She had gotten married in Venice and was a movie star.”Ms. von Fürstenberg in Monte Carlo in 2007. Descended from Charlemagne and the founder of Fiat, she lived a lavish life, including as an actress, model, artist and fashion executive.Hubertus von HohenloheWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      María José Llergo’s Songs Have Flamenco Roots. They Raise a Ruckus.

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      This Spanish singer’s debut, “Ultrabelleza,” experiments with a signature genre of her Andalusian homeland, creating an unexpected homage.When the Spanish singer María José Llergo talks about flamenco, it often sounds as though she is describing something springing from beneath her feet. “The genre is rooted in my land,” she said, in a video call from her place just outside Madrid. “It’s in our roots.”Growing up in rural Andalusia, where flamenco was born, Llergo first became interested in music while watching her grandfather work on his farm. “I remember him raking the earth, watering the plants and singing — everything from tangos to boleros,” she said, speaking in Spanish. Life for him wasn’t exactly easy back then. “My grandparents come from very humble — albeit very happy — origins,” said Llergo, surrounded by family portraits. She comes from that world too.Llergo, now 29, has developed a voice and singing style of her own, but she’s intent on keeping regional traditions alive. Infusing electronica and R&B with traditional Andalusian influences — including flamenco snaps and the off-kilter melodies of cante jondo, a guttural singing style common to folk music in the south of Spain — Llergo’s 2020 EP “Sanación” is a testament to the versatility of flamenco as a genre. “Ultrabelleza,” her debut album out Friday, takes this experiment a step further.The record’s lead single, “Rueda, Rueda,” begins with a chant and handclaps before a sprawling pop chorus arrives. On tracks like “Visión y Reflejo,” Llergo even tries her hand at rapping. “María had never done it before,” the Spanish indie singer Zahara, who was one of the album’s main producers, said in a video call. “But she managed to do it in one take when we were recording the song. It was super impressive.”“Flamenco is like the blues,” Llergo said. “The lyrics tell stories of survival.”Jordi Terry for The New York TimesLlergo said she knows she isn’t the first person to traverse genres — and she’s not just talking about the Catalan pop star Rosalía, whose debut album, “El Mal Querer,” is often credited with catapulting flamenco into 21st-century global pop. (Incidentally, she and Llergo both studied at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona under the same mentor, José Miguel Vizcay.)“Flamenco has always lent itself to other styles. All you have to do to find proof of that is look back at people like Lola Flores and Camarón,” Llergo said, referring to Camarón de la Isla, the singer often credited as the 20th century’s “god” of flamenco. “It’s always been global.”During the 1970s and ’80s, Camarón de la Isla, a Romani from Cádiz whose stage name is Spanish for “shrimp,” breathed new life into flamenco by adding instruments not traditionally found in the genre, such as the drums and bass guitar, to his recordings. His heartfelt lyrics and acrobatic vocal range would also eventually earn him a reputation as one of the country’s top crooners: In his best-known song, “Como el Água,” he compares the strength of his love for someone to a river running through the sierra.Llergo tends to speak in that language, too, drawing from the rich natural landscapes of southern Spain to tell stories about herself, her hometown and the people in it. “I run through your body like water runs through a river,” she sings in the synth-heavy “Juramento,” in a nod to her predecessor.While “Juramento” and other songs on the record don’t necessarily sound like flamenco, Llergo knows there are different ways artists can pay homage to the genre. Drawing clear demarcations around who or what fits into it isn’t one of them. “It’s flamenco’s ability to mix into other genres that makes it more appealing on a global level,” she said.From the plucky guitar riffs on Madonna’s 1987 hit “La Isla Bonita” to the handclaps, or palmas, on Caroline Polachek’s “Sunset” from earlier this year, there’s a long history of American pop artists’ experimenting with flamenco. As the market becomes friendlier to Spanish-language pop, listeners might find themselves looking for more of the genre.“Folk music in general — take regional Mexican music, for example — is becoming increasingly popular,” said Manuel Jubera, Llergo’s A&R at Sony Music Spain, in a recent phone interview. “So it’s a good moment for flamenco to export itself.” Next year Llergo will bring her music directly to the United States with a show at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex in Los Angeles in March and one at Le Poisson Rouge in New York the following week.Llergo’s music draws from the rich natural landscapes of southern Spain to tell stories about herself, her hometown and the people in it.Jordi Terry for The New York Times“I remember the first time I went to New York, I couldn’t stop crying and taking videos on my phone,” she said. “I still think about the way the sun reflects on the buildings there.” (When she’s on the road, she misses home, though. She beckoned her 1-year-old Chihuahua, Torres, to show him off on camera, but he was nowhere to be found.)When Llergo was in New York, she found herself reflecting on the culture of her homeland. “I thought about Federico García Lorca a lot,” she said, referring to his book, “Poet in New York,” written during a 10-month stint in the city in 1929.Like Llergo, García Lorca came from Andalusia. “And do you know what the street I grew up in in Pozoblanco is called?” she asked, looking straight at the camera, her eyebrows rising. “Federico García Lorca.”These types of connections — including ones between America and Spain — are often on her mind. “Flamenco is like the blues,” she said. It originated in Andalusia’s marginalized Roma communities. “The lyrics tell stories of survival — it’s always been a way for the most oppressed to escape.” Llergo, who said she faced discrimination at school because of her lower-class background, still finds solace in them.Like many people, she also appreciates the communal nature of flamenco, an idea grounded in the concept of el jaleo, roughly “hell-raising” or causing a ruckus, which refers to the audience’s hand-clapping, foot-stomping shouts of encouragement during a performance.Over the years, a number of people have encouraged Llergo to raise hell too, and when she looks to the future, she can’t help but feel grateful for them. “It’s crazy,” she said. “To think that when my grandfather was watering the plants in his field, he was also nurturing me.” More

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      in Theater

      With ‘Company,’ Antonio Banderas Brings Sondheim to Spain

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      Many Broadway blockbusters make their way to Madrid, but Banderas wants to push the envelope with serious, complex musicals that are little-known in Spain.On a recent Friday night, a fashionable Madrid audience leaped to its feet at the end of a performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” The crowd cheered the 40 onstage actors and musicians, but the most enthusiastic ovations were reserved for Antonio Banderas, the production’s director and star. For the past nearly three hours, the Spanish actor had crooned, belted and twirled his way through the first Spanish-language production of the groundbreaking 1970 musical.Banderas’s “Company” started life a little more than a year ago in Málaga, the actor’s hometown in southern Spain, where he founded a musical theater company, Teatro del Soho, in 2019. After a stop in Barcelona earlier this year, the production is ending its run in Madrid, where it is playing through Feb. 14, 2023, at the Teatro Albéniz.“I actually am an actor because of musical theater and musical movies,” Banderas, 62, said in an interview the next day. As an adolescent in 1970s Málaga, he explained, he grew up with the great musicals of the era, including “Hair,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Godspell.”That early love was the inspiration behind Teatro del Soho, a nonprofit that Banderas compared to the Public Theater in New York, which aims to bring musicals other than blockbuster Broadway fare to Spanish theatergoers. (The company’s most recent production is Stephen Schwartz’s “Godspell.”)Over the past two decades, Madrid has emerged as the musical theater capital of the Spanish world. Among the 14 shows running there are “Tina,” “Mamma Mia!,” “We Will Rock You” and “The Lion King” (“El Rey León”). Now Banderas is trying to push the envelope with serious, complex works that are little-known here — and “Company” has been on Banderas’s mind for a long time.In 2003, Banderas was starring in the musical “Nine” on Broadway, playing Guido, a filmmaker having a creative crisis. Banderas recalled Sondheim visiting his dressing room during the run, and drawing similarities between Guido and Bobby, the protagonist of “Company.” He also told Banderas that there was more to that show that met the eye: “I love to create plays with enigmas,” the actor recalled Sondheim saying.After the meeting, Banderas said he immersed himself in Sondheim’s catalog. “Company” in particular became something of an obsession.Banderas received the composer’s blessing to change the age of the musical’s main character, Bobby, from 35 to 50.Javier NavalWhen “Company” premiered in 1970, it looked like nothing else on Broadway: Formally daring, and laced with irony, it is often described as a “concept musical” and has little plot to speak of. Instead, Sondheim and George Furth, who wrote the book, serve up a series of loosely connected scenes about a commitment-phobic bachelor and his friends.Banderas’s main change to the book is an age switch for Bobby — the role he plays — from 35 to 50. The composer-lyricist signed off on that before his death in 2021 at age 91, Banderas said.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91.Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows.Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview.His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers.‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing?‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.Everything in his production followed from having an older Bobby, Banderas said. The show’s vignettes are like hallucinatory episodes, as Bobby sifts through memories and dreams of his youth; regrets take on a haunting dimension because of “the proximity of death,” Banderas added.“It was always very shocking to me how much everything was thoroughly focused on Bobby,” Banderas said. “Bobby is a charismatic character, but he’s also an egotistical coward.”In Banderas’s staging, Bobby sometimes sits center stage as the large cast rotates around him. Behind them, the New York City skyline looms majestically. “I created a glittering universe and he’s in the center, as the sun,” Banderas said.Banderas has cast most of the show’s other parts with local performers. “Twenty years ago, you couldn’t find this amount of actors and actresses in Spain,” for musical theater, he said. He also insisted on using the show’s original orchestration. “I have 26 musicians here, which is not profitable,” he said, but added, “I love that sound.” (For comparison, the 2021 Broadway revival of “Company” used a 14-person band.)To create a convincing Spanish-language version, Banderas turned to Roser Batalla and Ignacio García May, a duo who had previously worked together on “A Chorus Line.”“Every Sondheim is a challenge,” said Batalla, a translator and actress from Barcelona who was in a Catalan-language production of “Company” there 25 years ago. The lyrics and music are so closely bound in the show and, indeed, in all of Sondheim’s work, she added.Banderas and the actress Marta Ribera lead the cast.Javier Naval“You have to maintain not only the rhymes and syllables and the cadence of the music, but also give the information at the right point,” said Batalla, who has translated other Sondheim shows into Spanish and Catalan.She recalled meeting Sondheim in Barcelona, in 1995, at a performance of “Sweeney Todd,” which she had translated into Catalan. “He said, ‘As long as all the ideas get to the audience, I’m OK with it.’ He never asked us for the back-translation of any of the shows,” she said.“Company” holds some thorny problems for translators. Batalla pointed to “Getting Married Today,” a punishing, rapid-fire song for a hyperventilating bride — and a high point in most performances — as a particular challenge. “It’s very quick and it needs to be understood,” she said. Spanish had relatively few monosyllabic words to recreate the song’s patter, she added, but the language’s flexible syntax helped offset the difficulty.She left some culturally and geographically specific references to 1970s New York in place, Batalla said: Since American culture is so dominant, those still resonate with Spanish audiences. “We’ve been seeing movies by Woody Allen all our life long,” she said.May, a noted Spanish playwright, said the main challenge in translating the dialogue was finding a “high-class Spanish” that matched the snappy, urbane tone of the book. He weighed “every word, every verb, every nuance, so it could be as close to the English as possible,” he said.Critics here have largely been convinced: The daily newspaper El País hailed the production as “one of the best musicals ever seen in Spain.” For Banderas, the reception is a validation of his passion and commitment.“When we put together Teatro del Soho, it was to do the musicals that actually don’t get to Spain,” he said. In addition to his work there, Banderas recently teamed up with Andrew Lloyd Webber to create Amigos Para Siempre, a joint venture to license, produce and develop theatrical work for the world’s Spanish-speaking markets.Banderas called it an opportunity to “create a platform of Broadway in Spanish to the world.” “But it’s going to take time,” he added.CompanyThrough Feb. 14, 2023, at he Teatro Albéniz, in Madrid; companyelmusical.es. More

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      in Music

      María Mendiola, Half of a Chart-Topping Disco Duo, Dies at 69

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      “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” which she and a fellow ballet dancer recorded under the name Baccara, became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s.MADRID — María Mendiola, a member of the Spanish duo Baccara, whose “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” became one of the disco anthems of the 1970s, died here on Sept. 11. She was 69.Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her family. They did not give the exact cause, but said that she had been dealing with a blood deficiency for two decades.Baccara, the duo of Ms. Mendiola and Mayte Mateos, achieved instant fame with “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” the first song they ever recorded, which was released in 1977 and went on to become the most successful disco song by a female duo. It sold about 18 million copies worldwide and topped the charts in Britain, Japan and several other countries.Ms. Mendiola and Ms. Mateos were dancers with the company of Spain’s national television broadcaster when they met. At the suggestion of Ms. Mendiola, who thought that their careers would last longer if they switched to singing, they left to form their own act, originally called Venus, which began performing in 1976. Their debut, at a club in Zaragoza, was short-lived: The management fired them for being “too elegant” — another way of saying that they refused to do lap dances for the club’s patrons.The duo appeared for the first time on television in 1977. Their breakthrough came that same year following a chance encounter with Leon Deane of RCA Records, who saw them perform in a hotel while he was on vacation in the Canary Islands and suggested that they visit RCA’s recording studios in Hamburg.RCA agreed to produce Baccara’s first album and included “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,” an English-language song whose rights the label already owned, although it had not yet assigned it to any of its artists.Baccara spent four years with RCA and released four albums, including several other songs that ranked high on the international charts, although none matched the success of their first hit. The duo also toured worldwide, including in the Soviet Union. In performance, Ms. Mendiola always dressed in white and Ms. Mateos in black.But the two singers had a major fallout in 1980 over who should be the lead voice on their song “Sleepy Time Toy.” Ms. Mendiola filed a lawsuit to block the song, which had just been released and had to be withdrawn from the market.The singers continued their feud and stopped talking to each other, and the composer of most of their songs, Rolf Soja, decided to quit working with them. In 1981, Baccara released their final album with RCA, “Bad Boys”; coming at a time when the popularity of disco music was starting to wane, it was not a big success. RCA did not renew Baccara’s recording contract, and the two singers formalized their split.María Eugenia Martínez Mendiola was born on April 4, 1952, in Madrid. Her mother, Lola Mendiola, was a homemaker; her father, Emilio Martínez, was a police official at the Madrid airport.Ms. Mendiola studied at an Italian school in Madrid and trained to be a ballet dancer at the national school there before joining the Spanish state broadcaster’s dance troupe.Even though both singers were Spanish, Baccara represented Luxembourg in the 1978 Eurovision song contest, with a song about a holiday romance called “Parlez-Vous Français?” (Ms. Mendiola spoke five languages, including French.) Luxembourg’s entry finished seventh in the competition.After Baccara broke up, the two singers pursued separate careers. In 1981, Ms. Mendiola formed another duo, New Baccara, with another former ballet dancer, Marisa Pérez. While they never came close to matching the fame of the original Baccara, one of their songs, “Call Me Up,” was a hit in Spain in 1987 and also did well in Germany.Ms. Pérez ended her career in 2008 because of an illness, and a niece, Laura Mendiola, replaced her as Ms. Mendiola’s partner. In 2010, Ms. Mendiola formed a final partnership — Baccara Featuring María Mendiola — with another singer, Cristina Sevilla, who had previously collaborated for six years with Ms. Mateos. Their most recent single, “Gimme Your Love,” was released in 2018.Ms. Sevilla said that she had planned to continue with Ms. Mendiola, but that the pandemic had put their most recent concert projects on hold.“María was a powerful woman, who was always laughing even in the difficult moments,” Ms. Sevilla said. “Apart from being my partner, she was my real friend.”Ms. Mendiola is survived by a son, Jimmy Lim, and three grandchildren.“Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” had an unexpected revival, thanks to a Scottish soccer player, Andrew Considine, who had danced to the song at his bachelor party. Last year, a video of him and other players dancing to the song went viral, which inspired a cover version of the song by a Glasgow rock band, the Fratellis. The song also became an unofficial soccer anthem in Scotland, belted out by fans in the stadium during the recent European championships.While Scotland and soccer put Baccara back in the spotlight, Ms. Mendiola told the British news media that she wasn’t impressed by the Scottish version of the chart-topping song. It was, she said, “not my cup of tea.” More

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      in Movies

      I’m Obsessed With ‘Old.’ The Twist: I Won’t See It.

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      M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie has a trailer that eerily resonates with our strange times; and that’s enough for me.Let me say up front that I do not expect to see M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, “Old,” which arrived in theaters last week, for no other reason than that I am traveling and haven’t set foot in a theater in almost two years. But in the past few weeks, I have watched its trailer over and over, enthralled by its combination of existential horror and unintended humor. The trailer introduces us to some people who become trapped on a remote beach, where they begin to age at an insanely accelerated pace. Naturally, they try to figure out what’s happening, floating theories and freaking out. This being a Shyamalan film, the trailer promises they will spend a lot of time looking confused and concerned — the same facial feat Mark Wahlberg sustained across the running time of “The Happening” — and yelling at one another, demanding explanations.This is a familiar, Manichaean, Shyamalan-ish universe: A diverse group of bewildered souls, alone in a menacing void, earnestly playing out whatever endgame logic the scenario dictates. (It’s as though the director were compelled to continually make big-budget versions of “Waiting for Godot” — you think he can’t go on, but he’ll go on.) So we see a family on vacation, headed to the beach. The cast is soon filled out by others: a couple, a 6-year-old girl, a woman in a bikini making smoochie faces at her phone, two more men. Soon enough, the kids find things in the sand: rusted items from their hotel, cracked sunglasses, late-model iPhones. A young bleach-blonde corpse bobs toward a boy in the water. (She did not die of old age, but will decompose in hyperlapse.) Then the real aging begins. Parents confront their kids’ sudden adolescence. The 6-year-old girl grows up, becomes pregnant and gives birth on the beach. Some greater force is afoot, be it fate, God, time, Facebook or nature. Whatever it is, it clearly doesn’t care how many travel rewards points or memory-making family vacations you had in real life.Near the start of the trailer, Vicky Krieps’s character dreamily tells her impatient children: “Let’s all start slowing down.” Then everything starts speeding up. At some point she turns to her husband and exclaims, “You have wrinkles!” (The horror!) But of course “Old” will not be an allegory about the importance of sunscreen. What we’re being shown here looks far more like a meditation on mortality wrapped in a cautionary tale about our accelerated lives — about the scariness of time flying and kids growing up too fast, of bodies going to hell and the inescapability of death, and about the ravages we’ve visited upon the Earth, which will remain blanketed in all our fancy garbage long after it has turned us to dust.Part of what’s so captivatingly strange about the trailer is the way it takes a movie that compresses life into a couple of hours and then compresses that into a galloping two-and-a-half-minute highlight reel. Its breakneck, parodic pace calls to mind Tom Stoppard’s “15-Minute Hamlet,” in which all the most famous scenes from Shakespeare’s play are crammed (twice!) into a quarter of an hour. (In a film adaptation I once saw, Ophelia drowned herself by plunging her head into a bucket.) The title alone reduces the existential horror of the premise to a midlife freakout.The graphic novel from which this movie is adapted — “Sandcastle,” written by Pierre Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters — was inspired by Levy’s memories of childhood holidays. “He used to travel a lot to a beach exactly like this one, in the north of Spain,” Peeters told the comics site CBR. “Later, he went back with his own children, and one day he had this idea.” The beach could serve as a microcosm of Western society, “with some of its strong basic figures.” This was not a thriller, Peeters said — “it’s a fable.”It takes a movie that compresses life into a couple of hours and then compresses that into two and a half minutes.Shyamalan may be best known for his last-minute twists, but this was an option the “Sandcastle” authors ultimately decided against. According to Peeters, Levy had written a resolution to the story, a final twist — “but we finally decided it was useless, and would have destroyed the frightening dimension of the book.” The frightening dimension, of course, is that there is no escaping time, or death — and neither is there any simple revelatory twist in life that will explain what you’re meant to be doing with your time here.Anyone converting this source material into a movie has a choice to make: Either you embrace the terrifying meaninglessness of our short lives, or you try to offer consolation with a resolution to the story. The trailer tips its hand that Shyamalan has chosen the latter: The last words we hear are Gabriel Garcia Bernal’s character saying, “We’re here for a reason!” Maybe we are and maybe we are not, but my time on Earth is limited, and any story that attempts to wrap up the problem of life will feel like a waste of it.As I watched this trailer over and over, I was also, coincidentally, in Spain, where I lived for many years while growing up. I am writing from my brother’s new apartment in Madrid, which happens to be next door to the childhood home of a childhood friend. Walking my dog past her building, then meeting with her later, I find myself dwelling on the trailer, on the nature of time passing, on how compressed and accelerated it can feel. It’s strange to sit across from people you met in elementary school but haven’t seen in years. It makes you feel like the couples in the trailer, watching their spouses transform into their future selves. Time seems to pass at an accelerated rate when you return to a place periodically, over a long period, with large gaps in between.During the past year and a half of paralysis — this remote, isolated, slowed-down time, during which some of the most privileged among us were able to isolate in safety and comfort — it could seem as if the future were on hold. (It was not.) Time felt endless and slow until, for me, it accelerated significantly. I lost my mother suddenly. After 18 months of not traveling anywhere, I came back to the city where I lost my father, where my nephews were born, where my parents’ still-living friends have become elderly. It is funny to see how much has changed, and which things never change. I met a friend at a gallery opening and mentioned on arrival that I’d forgotten to iron my dress. He seemed happy to hear this: “You’re still you!” he said.Perhaps, for some of us, last year felt like a pause. But there was no pause. There never is. You look away for a moment, and your kid is tall. Your dog is old. Friends move away. You begin to wonder where this is all going. What’s the twist? When will it arrive? And then maybe you realize where you are, which may be a very old city — old to you and old in history, though not as old as some — and here you are, repeatedly watching a trailer for a movie, feeling a strange feeling.Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks and Other Mixed Messages” and a contributing writer for the magazine. More

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      in Music

      A Rapper, Hitting His 30s, Reinvents Himself as a Scion of Spanish Pop

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      C. Tangana was a provocative star of trap music. Now, his songs are played in supermarkets and praised by 50- and 60-somethings on YouTube.LONDON — C. Tangana, one of Spain’s biggest rap stars, two years ago hit “a little bit of a crisis.”He was riding a wave of fame, known for provocative songs and equally provocative interviews. But he was fast approaching his 30s, he said in a recent Zoom interview, and risked becoming one of those “cringe-y, embarrassing” rappers who act a decade younger than they are.So C. Tangana — real name Antón Álvarez Alfaro — did a U-turn and decided to try his hand at other styles of music that he had loved since childhood, like flamenco and rumba, even Spanish folk.“I was opening a window I’d kept closed,” he said, adding, “I assumed it would go wrong.”Álvarez’s experiment appears to have paid off. In February, he released “El Madrileño,” an album that mixes traditional Spanish and Latin American styles, including rock, with electronic sounds and beats more familiar to his trap and reggaeton fans. It’s turned him from Spain’s biggest rapper into one of its biggest pop stars.One of the album’s early tracks, “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer” (“You Stopped Loving Me”), has over 100 million views on YouTube.“You can listen to his music anytime, in any shop” Pablo Gil, a music journalist at El Mundo, a Spanish daily newspaper, said in a telephone interview.Some of the musical styles it features were last popular in Spain in the 1970s, when the country was under Franco’s dictatorship, Gil added. Álvarez, he said, was taking old-fashioned sounds, “subverting their meaning and making them modern.”In a review for the newspaper El País, the music critic Carlos Marcos wrote, “It remains to be seen whether this is the birth of a new Spanish pop, or something that we will forget in a few years.”“But who cares?” he added. “Let’s enjoy it today, and we’ll see tomorrow.”On YouTube, C. Tangana’s videos now attract comments from older music fans who would presumably never have gone near his records before. “I thought the music my son listened to was for landfill,” wrote Felix Guinnot, who said he was in his 50s, “but this boy is changing my musical perception.”On the set for the music video of “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer” (“You Stopped Loving Me”).Javier RuizÁlvarez’s road to fame has been winding, with multiple changes of name to reflect new musical personas. Born in Madrid, he started rapping in his teens, he said, but twice gave up on music entirely. When the 2008 global financial crisis hit Spain particularly hard — its lingering effects are still felt by the country’s youth — he stopped rapping to work in a fast-food restaurant. Later, he got a job in a call center selling cellphones.He started rapping again after falling in love with a colleague. It was a toxic relationship, Álvarez said, but it inspired him to get back into the studio. “I said, ‘It must be possible for me to make money doing this rather than selling phones or cleaning,’” he recalled. “It changed my whole mentality. I started to think I had to sell myself. I started to do things to get attention.”In 2017, Álvarez had his first major hit with “Mala Mujer,” a track about his longing for a “bad woman” whose “gel nails have left scars all over my body.” But he was soon known more for his relationship with Rosalía, a Spanish pop star (he co-wrote much of “El Mal Querer,” or “Bad Love,” her breakthrough album, although they have since broken up) and for getting into political controversies.Álvarez with the team filming a video for the song “Comerte Entera.” “You can listen to his music anytime, in any shop,” one music journalist said.Javier RuizÁlvarez used a derogatory term to refer to King Felipe VI at a 2018 news conference after being asked about the fate of another rapper who had been given a jail term for insulting the royal family. He also described the monarchy as “a robbery” and called for an end to “representative democracy,” arguing that it prevented the public from being directly involved in important decisions.The next year, the northern Spanish city of Bilbao threw C. Tangana off a concert lineup, saying that his lyrics were degrading to women.More recently, he called for people to reclaim Spain’s flag from fascists, a potentially contentious endorsement in a country where some associate it with Franco’s dictatorship.Ana Iris Simón, a music journalist and author who has written about the reaction to “El Madrileño,” praised Álvarez’s outspoken nature. “He’s not afraid of getting involved or giving his opinion,” she said in an email.Some critics still accuse him of being overly macho, Simón said. They point out that only one of the new album’s 15 guests is a woman (La Húngara, a flamenco singer). But Simón said those comments were out of touch with how Spaniards viewed him. “Public opinion and published opinion have never been as far apart as they are now,” she noted.Álvarez’s with the director Santos Bacana in Cuba, where they recorded a song with the guitarist Eliades Ochoa.Javier RuizThe new album also plays to Spain’s class divides, Simón said. It involves artists and musical styles “reviled by the cool cultural scene for years for being music typical of the common people,” she said. Álvarez uses those styles without irony, Iris added, instead embracing them as would an heir.Álvarez said his choice of collaborators — who include the Gypsy Kings, the flamenco band that was hugely popular in the 1980s; Ed Maverick, a “Mexican folk romantic”; and Jorge Drexler, a Uruguayan singer-songwriter — was driven by his love of artists who’ve taken their own distinct musical paths. But he also hoped the collaborations with Latin American musicians might change some Spaniards’ view of the region.“In Spain, we have this problem that a lot of people still have this colonial mentality,” Álvarez said. “They think that our culture is better than their culture, and that’s so stupid.”During the interview, Álvarez said he was overjoyed that his experiment had paid off. He talked a lot about the joy of being seen as a good songwriter. But he seemed happiest when asked about the album’s impact on one specific person. His mother had “always been super proud” of him, he said, “but now she can sing my songs.”Comments on his YouTube tracks suggest that is mother is not the only member of another generation doing that. Antonio Remacha, in Madrid, wrote a long message beneath one track saying that his daughter had forced him to listen to the record against his better judgment, but that he had loved it.“I have to admit that at 62 years of age, he’s managed to impress me,” Remacha wrote of Álvarez, before politely and formally signing off: “Congratulations and all of my praise.” More

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      Flory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97A charismatic musician, she sang and wrote songs that linked her to Jewish ancestors who lived in Spain until their expulsion in 1492.Flory Jagoda, left, performing with Heather Spence in Potomac, Md., in 2012. She sang songs she knew from her childhood in the former Yugoslavia and wrote new ones in the Sephardic tradition.Credit…Dayna Smith/Getty ImagesMarch 14, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETTo Flory Jagoda, the language, rhythms and joys of the Sephardic Jewish music she sang and wrote connected her to her beloved nona — her grandmother — who lived in the small mountain village of Vlasenica in the former Yugoslavia.“I think all the feeling that I have for the Sephardic culture, for stories, for song — it’s really a gift from her to me that I will have for the rest of my life,” Mrs. Jagoda said in an oral history interview for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museumin 1995.They were songs of home and family, of love and Hanukkah, many of them in the diasporic language — Ladino, a form of Castilian Spanish mixed with Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish — spoken by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. Some eventually settled in Vlasenica, where Mrs. Jagoda spent part of her childhood, among her beloved grandparents and extended family.Mrs. Jagoda was a Bosnian. She spoke Ladino with her family in Vlasenica, but she conversed in Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian to outsiders.“Our ancestors were Spanish Jews,” she said in the 2014 documentary “Flory’s Flame.” “You carry that love subconsciously. It’s in you. Everything that was Spanish to us was Jewish.”A charismatic musician who played accordion and guitar and was known for the quavery trills of her singing voice, Mrs. Jagoda recorded five albums; performed in her homeland long after immigrating to the United States; and was named a National Heritage Fellow in 2002 by the National Endowment for the Arts.Mrs. Jagoda died on Jan. 29 in a memory care facility in Alexandria, Va. She was 97.Her daughter Betty Jagoda Murphy confirmed the death.Flory Papo was born on Dec. 21, 1923, in Sarajevo, when it was the capital of Yugoslavia, to Samuel and Rosa (Altarac) Papo. Her father was a musician.When Flory was a baby, her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to Vlasenica, where they lived with her grandparents for several years and where she remained when her mother married Michael Kabilijo. Eventually, at about 10, Flory joined her mother and stepfather in Zagreb. She was close to her nona, Berta Altarac, and unhappy about the move to a big city.But she adjusted. Her stepfather bought her an accordion and adopted her. But the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 forced the family to move.Her stepfather bought train tickets to the Croatian city of Split, using gentile names for the family. Flory went first, charming other travelers on the trip by playing her accordion.“I play it for four hours,” she said in “Flory’s Flame.” “They all came into the compartment. They love it. They love music over there. They sang, we had a party, the conductor came in and sat there and he started singing. Saved my life.”She later wrote a song about the episode, which in English translation says in part:My father tells me,“Don’t speak! Just play your accordion!Play your accordion and sing your songs!”I don’t know why I’m running.What have I done?After Flory and her family had spent several months in Split, the Italian Fascists controlling the city sent hundreds of Jewish refugees, including them, to Korcula, a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea, where she taught accordion in exchange for food.In 1943, with the Nazis approaching Korcula and other Adriatic islands, Flory and her parents fled on a fishing boat to Bari, an Italian port city on the Adriatic. She spent the rest of the war there.While working as a typist for a U.S. Army salvage depot in Bari, she met Harry Jagoda, a master sergeant. They married in June 1945. She wore a gown made out of a parachute.Mr. Jagoda returned to the United States before her; she arrived in April 1946, on a ship with 300 Italian war brides.Over the next 27 years, Mr. Jagoda built a real estate development business in Northern Virginia. Mrs. Jagoda raised their four children, gave private guitar and piano lessons, and performed traditional Yugoslav folk music with the Washington Balalaika Society and other groups.But she did not sing the Ladino songs her grandmother had taught her. Her mother, who had emigrated with her husband to the United States in 1948, was haunted by the wartime massacre of 42 family members, including her mother, Flory’s nona, and felt that the Ladino language had died when they did.Her stepfather’s death in 1978, five years after her mother’s, let Mrs. Jagoda reset her musical course.With her parents gone, she began writing down the songs she knew from her childhood; she also started to write new ones in the Sephardic tradition. One of them, “Ocho Kandelikas” (“Eight Candles”), a Hanukkah song, has been performed by the United States Army Band and covered by many artists, including Idina Menzel, the band Pink Martini and the Chopped Liver River Band.Mrs. Jagoda sang at synagogues, folk festivals, community centers and universities, sometimes in various combinations with her daughters, Betty and Lori Jagoda Lowell; her son, Elliot; and two of her grandchildren. In 1985, the family gave concerts at several cities in the former Yugoslavia.“In Novi Sad, we gave a concert in a synagogue with no windows and birds flying in,” Ms. Jagoda Murphy said in a phone interview.Mrs. Jagoda taught her Sephardic oeuvre to Susan Gaeta, who became the older woman’s apprentice in 2003 through a program run by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. They performed as a duo and as the Flory Jagoda Trio, with Howard Bass.“Flory embodied her culture,” Ms. Gaeta said by phone. “Singing Sephardic music and talking about her family was like oxygen to her.”In 2003, Mrs. Jagoda sang at Auschwitz at the unveiling of a plaque to honor Sephardic Jews murdered by the Nazis. She sang a Ladino song, “Arvoles Yoran por Luvias” (“Trees Cry for Rain”), which Sephardic inmates had sung there.The words, translated into English, include the lines “I turn and say, what will become of me,/I will die in a strange land.”In addition to her daughters, Mrs. Jagoda is survived by a son, Andy; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Her husband and son Elliot both died in 2014.For Mrs. Jagoda, her grandmother’s influence never waned.“It was her mission,” she said during a concert in 2013 at the Smithsonian Institution, “to carry and to teach her young ones this language of her heritage — and never forget it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More