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Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Award-winning scenic designer David Korins calls his work on Broadway’s newest sensation “Here Lies Love” the “most ambitious piece of theater I’ve ever done.” And that’s a high bar: Korins counts The Oscars, “Beetlejuice” and “Hamilton” among his credits. Set to throbbing beats from David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, “Here Lies Love” centers on the Philippines’ controversial former First Lady, Imelda Marcos. The idea was to make the show as immersive as possible and turn a Midtown Manhattan theater into a disco ballroom.

Ethan Shanfeld Just over a year after her latest studio album “Laurel Hell,” Mitski has returned with new music. On Wednesday, the beloved and hermetic indie rocker released the acoustic ballad “Bug Like an Angel,” which serves as the lead single to her upcoming album “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” out Sept. 15 via Dead Oceans.

Jimmy Eat World and Manchester Orchestra are officially on tour together!

The Summer I Turned Pretty's of —titled “Love Scene”—features quite possibly the most romantic moment ever on TV between two star-crossed lovers: and . Set to a sweeping score of a full orchestra, the two—via flashback to the previous winter when Conrad's mom, Susannah, was still alive, and so much sadness and drama didn't exist—make love in front of the fireplace at the Fisher summer house on Cousins Beach. It's sensual, it's romantic, and it's the kind of scene that you want to rewatch over and over again. (Btw, when Belly whispers to a sleeping Conrad that “… there's only you.

Alissa Simon Film Critic Bulgarian multi-hyphenate Stephan Komandarev completes his trilogy on social problems and moral ills in contemporary Bulgaria with “Blaga’s Lessons,” world premiering in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Crystal Globe competition. Heretic is the sales agent. After “Directions” (2017), which centers on tough times for some Sofia taxi drivers over a long and eventful night, and “Rounds” (2019), about police officers patrolling the capital, Komandarev and his co-writer Simeon Ventsislavov use an older woman duped by a telephone scam to look at issues afflicting their parents’ generation. Komandarev says: “The Bulgarian pensioners turned out to be the real victims of the so-called ‘transition’ (the time from 1989 to today.) These people, who have worked and created persistently all their lives, have lost basic safety and security, normal food, adequate medical care, heating, etc.”

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor As Emmy voting comes to a close, score mixer Phil McGowan could find himself with multiple nominations, having worked on the sound of Paramount+’s “Star Trek: Picard,” Netflix’s “Cobra Kai” and “Ozark,” and Roku’s “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” He spoke with Variety about his approach to each project and what needed to be taken into consideration to preserve the sonic integrity in his mixes. “This season was bigger and more maximal than previous seasons, but there wasn’t a big sonic shift. However, each episode is like a movie. Composers Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson approach it like it’s another ‘Karate Kid’ film. There are guitars, a drum kit, drum machines and lots of percussion. They use a lot of samples that are reminiscent of the 1980s and ’90s. So, I have fun applying mixing techniques with reverb that blends ’80s hair metal and ’90s pop music along with big orchestral symphonic sounds on the show.”

Glastonbury Festival is officially underway, with all the action kicking off across the main stages from Friday, June 23.

On today’s Crew Call we talk with The English composer Federico Jusid, who came into Hollywood’s spotlight after the industry caught his score on the Oscar winning 2009 foreign film, The Secret in Their Eyes.

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Those with long memories can recall when the otherworldly Icelandic combo Sigur Ros’ music first began filtering over to these shores at the turn of this century — maybe on Napster or Limewire after Radiohead’s Thom Yorke began mentioning them in interviews, or on a burned CD from a friend who had one of their hard-to-find-even-in-metropolises imports. Hearing them for the first time was like taking a voyage to a different musical planet, guided by a vocalist named Jonsi who sang in both Icelandic and an invented language over lush, towering, majestic music that evoked National Geographic landscapes and summoned purple prose from critics even more pretentious than the line you just read. While there were certainly influences — Cocteau Twins, Eno, electronic music and film soundtracks — Sigur Ros were like absolutely no one else, and their sound (and lineup) evolved over the early ‘00s and beyond, incorporating orchestras on one album, rock-centric structures on the next, ambient on the one after, while still remaining unmistakably them.

Sigur Rós have surprise released a new album, almost ten years to the day since their last long player ‘Kveikur’ came out. The new record is called ‘Átta’ and is being released in partnership with BMG, just ahead of their performance with the London Contemporary Orchestra tonight as part of the Southbank Centre’s Meltdown festival.The album features both frontman Jónsi and bassist Georg Holm along with multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson, who returned to the band last year.Once back in the studio, Jónsi says, they found themselves “just wanting to have minimal drums and for the music to be really sparse, floaty and beautiful.

Indiana Jones may have had his Cannes world premiere, but Disney saved something special for the Hollywood splash of the alleged final chapter in the franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Jon Burlingame “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story” has one of the most complicated, and yet stylistically unified, scores of any series this year — Kris Bowers‘ original score, the 18th-century period music, and a surprising number of string-quartet covers of 21st-century hits. The Netflix series, a prequel to the 2021 hit “Bridgerton,” imagines a Black bride for England’s King George III in 1761, chronicling their initially rocky marriage and her gradual understanding of the monarch’s mental illness; flash-forwards to 1817 feature an older and wiser queen. Bowers, who earned two Emmy nominations for his work, returned for the prequel but took a different approach. “This show needed a level of intimacy that the score for ‘Bridgerton’ doesn’t necessarily have,” he says. “My initial instinct was to write for a smaller ensemble, and to mic and mix the music in a way that was more intimate and tactile, a sense of closeness to the instruments.”

Jon Burlingame On the scoring stage at 20th Century-Fox studios in Burbank, composer Jongnic Bontemps is walking around in a “Transformers: The Movie” T-shirt – that’s the animated cartoon from 1986, not the $200-million summer blockbuster he’s just scored. “Violins, play a little softer,” he tells the musicians via intercom from the glass booth behind the stage. “It has to be emotional.” Later, after a rehearsal on a different cue, he tells the string players, “It needs to feel like a warm blanket.” Bontemps is making movie history. He has just spent two years writing the music for “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” the seventh in the big-screen franchise, and he’s supervising the recording of the final pieces of the score with a 74-piece orchestra. The film opens Friday.

stream on Max starting June 27.Directed by two-time Oscar winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, the film follows the 24-hour performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn as Mac performs renditions of songs dating back to America’s origins in the 18th century, from “Yankee Doodle” to “Gloria.” Along the way, Mac complements the alternative tour of American history with elaborate costumes designed by Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle and make-up designer Anastasia Durasova.As the show goes on, one member of Mac’s 24-piece orchestra leaves the stage every hour, until only Mac is left to close out the show after performing this one-time-only performance without any rest.

Brian Eno has announced details of his first-ever solo tour. The run of European dates, scheduled for October, come in support of his 2016 album The Ship. Tickets will be available from Thursday, June 8.

Here Lies Love,” advertising a score by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim and direction by the ground-breaking Tony winner Alex Timbers. The show’s logo is superimposed over a mirror ball, literally reflecting the production’s highly unusual immersive nightclub setting, a semi-ironic counterpoint to a sobering story about the rise and fall of fascistic Filipino power couple Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. The tag line above that disco totem: “The Revolutionary Music Experience.” It’s a revolution that the union representing Broadway musicians would like to stop in its tracks, at least in its current form. And with the show set to open for previews in less than two weeks, the production and the Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians remain at loggerheads about how “Here Lies Love” will, or should, proceed.

Jon Burlingame “Star Trek” fans are still buzzing about the music of the final season of “Picard.” That’s because the lavish symphonic score by Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann references multiple themes from throughout the 57-year history of “Trek” movies and TV shows. Barton, who scored seven of the 10 episodes and collaborated with Wiedmann on the finale, says that the idea belonged to showrunner Terry Matalas. “From the very beginning, we chatted a lot about the ‘Star Trek’ we grew up with. This was a moment in the franchise to take a step back, look at the whole picture, and say, how can we honor this?” Matalas has “an amazing, vast knowledge” of “Trek” music, Wiedmann says. “He’s as enthusiastic about film scores as we are – which, in the end, was extremely helpful for us because Terry had such a clear idea on where to go with the music.”

Brian Eno has announced his first solo tour, nearly 50 years after the release of his first album under his own name. He has announced seven shows around Europe, including two in London at the end of October.Titled ‘Ships’, the new show is an adaptation of Eno’s 2016 album ‘The Ship’, and will see him joined on stage by the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, guitarist Leo Abrahams and keyboardist Peter Chilvers.

Jon Burlingame Music has always been an integral part of the “Star Wars” universe, dating back to the John Williams scores for the original movie trilogy. So will Emmy voters recognize one, two or all three of the recent “Star Wars” TV series in the scoring categories? Vying for consideration: the 12-part “Andor,” with music by Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated Nicholas Britell (“Succession”); the six-part “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” with a new theme by Williams and score by English composer Natalie Holt (“Loki”); and the eight-part third season of “The Mandalorian,” with music by Joseph Shirley. All aired on Disney+. Britell spent more than two years on “Andor,” the backstory of “Rogue One” hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), including several months creating music that was played on the set during filming – from the Time Grappler’s hammer-banging signals on Ferrix to the alien electronica in the clubs on Morlana and the amateur funeral band playing a dirge for Cassian’s mother in the finale.

K.J. Yossman Sean Bean and Miranda Richardson are set to star alongside John Malkovich in the biopic of Romanian composer Sergiu Celibidache, Variety can reveal. Also joining the cast is Ben Schnetzer (“The Book Thief”), who has replaced Rupert Friend after scheduling difficulties meant Friend had to drop out of the project. Schnetzer will play a young version of Celebidachi while Malkovich will play the composer later in life. They will be joined by Kate Phillips (“Downton Abbey”), Anton Lesser (“Game of Thrones”) and Charlie Rowe (“Rocketman”). “The Yellow Tie” tells the story of controversial classical conductor Sergiu Celibidache, one of Romania’s best known classical music artists. He battled homelessness and prejudice before becoming the youngest ever conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Manchester’s top classical organisations are collaborating for Manchester Classical, a festival weekend celebrating the city’s rich musical heritage.

Tony Christie is perhaps best known for his hit (Is This The Way To) Amarillo, but this July he’s encouraging us all to sing our hearts out as part of a mass singalong paying tribute to the UK’s hard-working carers.

DEALSUniversal Music’s Capitol Records has signed Teo Glacier off the back of his recent viral hit ‘Too Much’. “I never imagined myself signed to a label, especially one with the history of Capitol Records”, he says. “I still can’t really believe it to be honest.

Far from a victim of the second album curse, Lewis Capaldi's brand-new record Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent already claims the title of 2023's fastest-selling LP so far, the Official Charts Company can confirm.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “Club Zero,” a teen-cult thriller from director Jessica Hausner, may have Cannes Film Festival attendees thinking twice about ordering that second croissant on the Croisette. The movie, which preaches the art of “conscious eating” and will definitely force viewers to consider the way they consume food, may be one of the more polarizing titles to debut at this year’s festival. Still, it earned afive-minute standing ovation at Monday night’s premiere. In the film, Mia Wasikowska, a favorite from “Jane Eyre” and “Alice in Wonderland,” stars as the nutrition teacher from hell at an elite prep school. It all starts innocently, as teen cults are wont to do, with Miss Novak instructing her students that eating less is healthy, for themselves and for the environment. By the time the other educators and parents take note, an unthinkable reality has already started to unfold.

Lewis Capaldi is currently outselling the rest of the Official Albums Chart Top 20 combined as he surges towards Number 1 with Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent. 

Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales visited the Anna Freud Centre in London today, where the children's mental health charity of the same name is based. It comes as the royals mark Mental Health Awareness Week with a number of engagements this week, with Kate, 41, attending a Dame Kelly Holmes Trust event in Bath on Tuesday.

PBS’s National Memorial Day Concert will return on May 28 with a lineup that includes a tribute to Vietnam War POWs and Gold Star families, as well as a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice and a remembrance of World War II.

Peter Andre has gushed about his "incredible" night on Saturday, 13 May, when he paid tribute to the late Michael Jackson in concert at the famous London Palladium theatre.The 50 year old star joined forces with the National Philharmonic Concert Orchestra to celebrate the music of Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five at the concert.The dad of four posted a video to Instagram of him onstage singing at the event, which was taken by someone in the crowd. In the caption, Peter wrote: "Last night was incredible on so many levels. It was on my bucket list for celebrating 30 years to do this and that box is ticked.

Kate Middleton put her musical skills on display in a special segment opening the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 Grand Final over the weekend.In a clip shared to the Prince and Princess of Wales' official Instagram account, Middleton is seen taking part in the opening sequence of the contest's final leg by playing last year's winning entry on the piano.

Eurovision Song Contest final was the most watched grand final in the competition’s history, the BBC has said.The final of the competition, which was held in Liverpool, attracted an average of 9.9 million viewers, with a peak of 11 million. This represented a 63 per cent share of the audience overall.The last ratings peak occurred in 2011 when an average of 9.5 million watched.

Mae Muller has said she is “proud of everyone” as she admitted her second-from-bottom Eurovision finish was “not the result we hoped for”.The London-born singer took to the stage in Liverpool for the Eurovision Song Contest final but finished 25th with I Wrote A Song, claiming 24 points. Germany was the only nation to finish below the UK, on 18 points.

Mike McCahill Guest Contributor The theme of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, ‘United by Music,’ announced both the annual musical extravaganza’s all-embracing intentions and its status as a joint endeavor. With 2022 winners Ukraine unable to host in Kyiv due to the war, the U.K. – last year’s runners-up, thanks to Sam Ryder’s soaring “Space Man” – stepped in to reinstall this ever more spectacular circus (along with multiple Ukrainian creative personnel) in Liverpool, birthplace of the Beatles. A declaration that this was to be the glitziest of collabs was served via a prologue that paired Ukraine’s Kalush Orchestra, reworking last year’s winning entry “Stefania”, with the Princess of Wales, apparently providing piano accompaniment from within Windsor Castle. Soft power-a-go-go.

Kate Middleton made a surprise cameo at the Eurovision Song Contest final on Saturday night.  The 41-year-old Princess of Wales gave a pre-recorded piano performance in the international song competition's opening segment, which she filmed earlier this month at the Crimson Drawing Room of Windsor Castle. Middleton played an instrumental version of the Ukrainian group Kalush Orchestra's song "Stefania," which won the contest last year.

Kate Middleton made a surprise appearance at 2023’s Eurovision Song Contest.

K.J. Yossman Sweden has won the Eurovision Song Contest 2023. Swedish contestant Loreen came first with her song “Tattoo,” beating out 25 other countries to garner 583 points. Her win means the contest will likely be held in Sweden next year. Traditionally the winning country hosts the following year’s contest. Sweden was followed by Finland’s Käärijä with 526 points and Israel’s Noa Kirel with 362 points, who took second and third place respectively. This year’s Eurovision took place in Liverpool, U.K. on behalf of last year’s winner Ukraine after it was deemed too dangerous to hold Eurovision in the country following the Russian invasion. Ukrainian entry Kalush Orchestra won last year’s contest followed by the U.K.’s Sam Ryder in close second.