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☆ The Maestro’s Latest Opus: A Video Game to Save Classical Music
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-28 | by ( Simi Horwitz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Asked which of his many roles most defines him, Mr. Dubal responded with some drama: “I never want to define myself.” His eyes grew wide. Nietzsche said that.” Like a judge pounding a gavel, he slapped his palm onto his coffee table. Every day.”Mr. Dubal was born around 1944 (he would prefer not to say exactly) and was raised in Cleveland. One day, while sitting in the dentist’s chair, he learned about an opening for the job of music director at WNCN, a classical music station. Despite his dire cultural predictions, Mr. Dubal expresses a quirky optimism and a healthy dose of irony.

☆ ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Wins the Palme d’Or
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-27 | by ( Manohla Dargis | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The 76th Cannes Film Festival ended Saturday with the Palme d’Or awarded to “Anatomy of a Fall.” Directed by Justine Triet, this intellectual thriller centers on a woman who is brought to trial after the mysterious death of her husband. Written by Triet and Arthur Harari, the film was an early favorite with critics. Triet is the third woman to have won the Palme; Julia Ducournau won in 2021 for “Titane,” and Jane Campion took the prize in 1993 for “The Piano.”The Palme was presented to Triet by Jane Fonda, who noted the “historic” number of women — seven — who had films competing for the top honor. The strong main competition, with a jury led by the director Ruben Ostlund, effectively announced that the festival had returned to full strength after several unsteady pandemic years. An icy exploration of the banality of evil — the family eats, relaxes and sleeps to the constant sounds of screams, shouts and gunfire — the movie sharply divided the critics here.

☆ After a Surprise Debut, the Conductor Thomas Guggeis Is Rising Fast
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-27 | by ( Joshua Barone | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Now, Guggeis might read about a discovery related to something he remembers studying in school. In between classes one day, he sat in on a rehearsal of Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” led by Petrenko. He recalled watching the young conductor lead a rehearsal and immediately thinking he was gifted. “And he was obviously a very natural conductor. He moved his arms in a natural way, and was naturally in command.

☆ The ‘Doughnut Dollies’ of World War II
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-25 | by ( Nell Freudenberger | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Urrea has a weakness for melodramatic imagery: a volume of Shakespeare with a bullet lodged in its pages, a G.I. But we need to be absolutely enmeshed in a character’s consciousness to witness something on the order of Buchenwald through her eyes. During the Battle of the Bulge, in January 1945, Irene and Dorothy take a bottle of Champagne to gunners operating a howitzer cannon. Like many veterans of war, Irene and Dorothy keep their memories to themselves after they return to civilian life. Even as Urrea tells the Clubmobilers’ story, he recognizes that some parts of their experience remain impossible to share with those who weren’t there.

☆ The ‘Succession’ Soundtrack Is Fit for a Concert Hall
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-25 | by ( Joshua Barone | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

And in “Succession,” he evokes a classical music tradition in which a composer doodles at the piano to improvise on a theme, putting it through permutations based on mood and form. This could serve as good parlor entertainment, but also the basis for inventive, kaleidoscopic works; Britell’s soundtrack, in its pairing of piano and orchestra, has an ancestor in Rachmaninoff’s concerto-like “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” He would do well to adapt his score into a similar piece. With his theme and variations, Britell offers a parallel of the show itself: an idée fixe established at the start — a patriarch’s departure from the top of his business empire is more of a when than an if — and a circular (some would say static) plot about the ways in which three of his children maneuver to take over. It is a premise that carries on even after the father’s death early this season; the most recent episode, about his funeral, demonstrates the psychological hold Logan Roy still has over his children and how, united in grief, they nevertheless continue to scheme.

☆ A Lego Crime, a YouTube Rivalry, and the End of a Star Wars Friendship
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-21 | by ( David Kushner | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +30 min

Those who are into Lego Star Wars are among the most popular. It was at an informal contest where Louis met Victor, a fellow Lego Star Wars fanatic. Soon they ranked among the most popular Lego Star Wars YouTubers in France, known for the size and scope of their MOCs. The two friends no longer fit with that satisfying click that comes from snapping together two Lego bricks. Though it must have taken a truck to haul away all of Louis' Lego, no neighbor reported seeing anything suspicious.

☆ You Don’t Need to Speak Another Language to Love a Bilingual Edition
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Hasan Altaf | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

In “The Rebel’s Silhouette,” for example, an untitled Urdu poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz on Page 50 is placed opposite its translation, by the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, on Page 51. Even if you don’t read Urdu, the original is sharply outlined: four lines in two couplets, taking up barely a third of the page. One great charm of a bilingual edition is that you don’t have to give up one for the other, as you would with a translation. You can have both at the same time, and treat language as a Jenga tower, moving its pieces but preserving its structure. Look at the beginning of another untitled poem and you can hear the music of “Passará/tem passado/passa com a sua fina faca” — the time-traveling verb, the echoing sibilants, the alliteration.

☆ Opinion | Is Musicology Racist?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( John Mcwhorter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Regarding the piano, for example, Ewell thinks it “enforces a commitment to whiteness and maleness,” and thus playing it should not be expected of those who teach music theory. Ewell also believes musicology should entail no foreign language requirements, because Greek, Latin, Italian, French and German are “white” languages. If we are to be maximally un-white about the matter, I am hoping he is referring to music theory work in Swahili, Hausa, Amharic or Twi, but it’d be good to have some specifics. Music theory has traditionally been taught with a major focus on the work of the Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker, whom Ewell specifically attacked in his 2019 article. The issue was widely condemned as racist in musicology circles, and Jackson was barred from the journal amid calls for his firing as a professor at the university that supports it.

☆ How Do You Get a High-Style House for $600,000? Build It Yourself.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Tim Mckeough | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

They initially thought of the half-acre lot in Indianola as a place for a weekend house. But in 2018, a new ferry started making the trip from nearby Kingston to downtown Seattle in 39 minutes. Faced with the opportunity to design almost anything, Mr. Gentry felt daunted. One side of the house has a large living space that includes the kitchen, dining area and a living room with a cast-concrete fireplace and a built-in daybed in a niche with a skylight. The couple considered building a music room for Ms. Ramsey, but decided to invite her songs into the heart of the home by keeping her piano and guitars in the living room.

☆ Swedish singer Loreen wins Eurovision Song Contest for 2nd time at event feting Ukraine
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-14 | by ( ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

Swedish singer Loreen won the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her power ballad "Tattoo," at a colorful, eclectic music competition clouded for a second year running by the war in Ukraine. Loreen, 39, previously won Eurovision in 2012 and is only the second performer to take the prize twice, after Ireland's Johnny Logan in the 1980s. Under the slogan "united by music," Eurovision final fused the soul of the English port city that birthed The Beatles with the spirit of war-battered Ukraine. Now in its 67th year, Eurovision bills itself as the world's biggest music contest — an Olympiad of party-friendly pop. "Now, the music industry, the world, knows that if you appear at Eurovision, you could be in for a great thing," said Steve Holden, host of the official Eurovision Song Contest podcast.

LIVERPOOL, England, May 13 (Reuters) - The grand final of Eurovision 2023 kicked off on Saturday with last year's winner Kalush Orchestra performing on video in Ukraine and live in Liverpool, the northern English city hosting on behalf of the country that is fighting Russia's invasion. The 26 acts that qualified for the grand final span musical styles from ballads to heavy rock to rap, starting with Austria's Teya & Salena performing "Who The Hell is Edgar? [1/6] Mimicat from Portugal performs during the grand final of the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool, Britain, May 13, 2023. Pam Minto, a 37-year-old support worker from Liverpool, said she was proud of her city and hoped it was doing Ukraine proud. Ukrainian Anastasiia Iovova, a 31-year-old teacher who is currently living in Leeds, northern England, said Liverpool felt like home abroad.

May 10 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google on Wednesday began unveiling more artificial intelligence in its products to answer the latest competition from Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), which has threatened its perch atop the nearly $300 billion search advertising market. He said Google is integrating generative AI into search. For years the top portal to the internet, Google has found its position in question since rivals began exploiting generative AI as an alternative way to present content from the web. That has represented a technological affront and a business one: Microsoft said every percentage point of share it gained in search advertising could draw another $2 billion in revenue. Pichai said earlier this year that generative AI to distill complex queries would come to Google Search, as would more perspectives, "like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar."

☆ When is Cannes Film Festival 2023 and what can we expect?
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

[1/6] The 75th Cannes Film Festival - The Palme d'Or Award - Cannes, France, May 17, 2022. Below are some facts about the Cannes Film Festival and this year's contenders. WHAT IS THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL AND WHY IS IT CELEBRATED? Cannes is the world's biggest film festival, first conceived in 1939 as an alternative to the then-fascist-influenced Venice Film Festival. Other awards include the Grand Prix, jury prize, best director, best actor, best actress, best screenplay and best short film.

☆ How the Star of ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Found Beauty in Her Voice Again
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( Laura Collins-Hughes | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

from Yale is in music. She followed up that show with two more Broadway musicals, “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella” (2013) and “Gigi” (2015). Around 2018, she set aside a solo show she’d been making about the impact of music on her life, worried that she might run out of voice onstage. “I had to fall in love again with myself and figure out how to love myself as I was changing,” she said. But it’s not that she can’t hit the high notes anymore, even if only one song in the pop-style “Kimberly Akimbo” asks her to.

May 10 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google on Wednesday is expected to unveil more artificial intelligence in its products to answer the latest competition from Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), which has threatened its perch atop the nearly $300-billion search advertising market. For years the top portal to the internet, Google has found its position in question since rivals began exploiting generative AI as an alternative way to present content from the web. That has represented a technological affront and a business one: Microsoft said every percentage point of share it gained in search advertising could draw another $2 billion in revenue. Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's chief executive, this year said generative AI to distill complex queries would come to Google Search, as would more perspectives, "like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar." At Wednesday's conference, it is expected to announce a more powerful AI model known as PaLM 2, CNBC reported.

☆ A 19-Year-Old Pianist Electrifies Audiences. But He’s Unimpressed.
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Javier C. Hernández | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“He’s a musician way beyond his years,” said the conductor Marin Alsop, who headed the Cliburn jury and led the Rachmaninoff performance. “Technically, he’s phenomenal, and the colors and dynamics are phenomenal. He’s incredibly musical and seems like a very old soul. Born in Siheung, a suburb of Seoul, Lim had a childhood filled with soccer, baseball and music. He began studying the piano at 7, when his parents enrolled him in a neighborhood music academy.

Paris CNN —France’s finance minister is in the spotlight. “It is about music, my passion for music,” Le Maire insisted of the novel, whose central character is a piano virtuoso. Some in France chastized the finance minister for devoting time to writing, especially as the country weathers economic headwinds. The French finance ministry confirmed to CNN that Le Maire had warned the French presidency of the book before its release. And the finance minister seemed unabashed on Twitter.

☆ The Producer Turning Sadness Into Pop Gold for Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Neil Shah | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Aaron Dessner battled depression as a teenager. Even as he played guitar and bass in bands, privately, he made brooding piano music on his own. “What I get sad about is the feeling of emptiness, the wreckage of losing people,” he says in an interview at his Long Pond Studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. “Bands break up, marriages break up, everybody breaks up, it kind of depresses me,” he says. “Maybe it’s naive, but I try to hold it all together.”

☆ Belgrade shooting: What we know about the attack
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Rob Picheta | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

CNN —A 13-year-old boy opened fire on his classmates at a school in the Serbian capital Belgrade on Wednesday, rocking the Balkan country. The shooting left at least eight children dead, along with a security guard. He took their lives.”The suspect then walked towards a history classroom, shooting as he moved down the corridor, before entering the room and shooting the teacher and his fellow students from the doorway, Milić said. Gasic said it was known that the father had previously gone to a shooting range with his son. I saw the school psychologist, I saw the school staff, the teachers who were in shock,” the father told N1.

☆ 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Herbie Hancock
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Marcus J. Moore | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Now, we’re turning to Herbie Hancock, the groundbreaking pianist and composer who emerged in jazz as something of a prodigy. His career took off after the trumpeter Donald Byrd asked Hancock to play in his quintet. By the early ’70s, Hancock had all but abandoned jazz for funk and ambient textures, and released challenging music that didn’t fit one box in particular. In 1973, he released his biggest album, “Head Hunters,” a propulsive funk odyssey that went platinum and led to Hancock playing to huge crowds. Below, we asked 11 musicians, writers and critics to share their favorite Hancock songs.

☆ 'Some Like It Hot' leads 2023 Tony nominations
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-02 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

May 2 (Reuters) - Film-turned-musical "Some Like It Hot," led the nominations announced Tuesday for the 2023 Tony awards, the highest honors in American theater, followed by "& Juliet," "New York, New York," and "Shucked." "Kimberly Akimbo," and a revival of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," also topped the list of nominations by production for the 76th annual awards, according to a statement from the Tony Awards committee. Best new musical nominees were "& Juliet," "Kimberly Akimbo," "New York, New York," "Shucked" and "Some Like it Hot," with "Sweeney Todd" and "Into the Woods" among the productions earning nods for best musical revival. The stage adaptation of the 1959 crime comedy film "Some Like It Hot," opened on Broadway in December and topped the list with 13 nominations. Reporting by Susan Heavey; editing by Jonathan OatisOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

☆ An Island Utopia Where Nobody Dies and the Living Is Easy
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-01 | by ( Chelsea Leu | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

THE FERRYMAN, by Justin CroninFor a science-fictional utopia created by a reclusive “Designer,” the world of “The Ferryman” bears a startling resemblance to the well-heeled strata of, say, San Francisco or New York. The art is bad, and no one seems to realize it. There’s something mildly intoxicating, in fact, about entering this utopia, called Prospera, because Cronin’s shrewd world-building allows us to have it both ways: We sink into aspirational fantasy even as we relish the author’s sly commentary on a certain species of coastal elite. (Prospera is an island, after all.) Rather than undergo the indignities of birth and death, old or infirm Prosperans are sent by ferry to a mysterious island called the Nursery, where their memories are wiped and their bodies rejuvenated, so they can return as hale 16-year-olds with new identities.

The 34-year-old is primarily an actress, but on the side, she's a travel nanny for billionaires in New York. "The qualities it takes to work for the ultra-wealthy is patience and a nuanced perception of anticipating a person's needs." Here's what they said about their lucrative side hustles:Nannying ultra-wealthy kidsNanny-matching site Care.com advises New York families to pay full-time nannies $21.25 per hour, the company's website says. Chauffeuring rich familiesA typical Uber driver in New York makes just over $45,000 per year, according to Glassdoor data. Frank Dorfman (right), alongside one of his daughters, started chauffeuring four years after he retired as a New York police detective.

☆ James Corden bids an emotional farewell to ‘The Late Late Show’
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Toyin Owoseje | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +2 min

CNN —After eight years and multiple Emmy awards, James Corden’s time as host of “The Late Late Show” has come to an end. James Corden sings "That's Our Show" to say his last goodbyes to "The Late Late Show" on April 27, 2023. “I’ve watched America change a lot. Over these past few years, I’ve watched divisions grow and I’ve seen and I’ve felt a sense of negativity bubble and at points boil over,” he added. Corden ended his final appearance by performing a piano ballad, as a video montage of his finest moments on the show played.

☆ Snapchat’s new AI chatbot is already raising alarms among teens and parents
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-27 | by ( Samantha Murphy Kelly | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +7 min

The feature is powered by the viral AI chatbot tool ChatGPT – and like ChatGPT, it can offer recommendations, answer questions and converse with users. The net effect is that conversing with Snapchat’s chatbot may feel less transactional than visiting ChatGPT’s website. Snapchat's new AI chatbot. “I snapped a picture … and it said ‘nice shoes’ and asked who the people [were] in the photo,” a Snapchat user wrote on Facebook. One user wrote on Facebook that she’s been asking My AI for homework help.

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