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Harry Styles announces fourth solo album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally

After a series of cryptic billboards teasing fans, the As It Was singer reveals the title and release date of his first record since 2022

After a brief teaser campaign in which billboards around the world promised “we belong together” and “see you very soon”, Harry Styles has announced his fourth solo album.

Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally will be released on 6 March. It was produced by Kid Harpoon, the British songwriter and producer who has worked on all of Styles’ previous albums. The artwork shows the 31-year-old pop star wearing sunglasses and ducking beneath a disco ball seemingly suspended from the night sky.

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© Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella

© Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella

© Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella

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Diary of a degenerate: mapping the music and the madness of Carlo Gesualdo

The Renaissance composer wrote hauntingly sublime music – and committed a grisly double murder before descending even further into psychosis. As a new stage work revisits his life, its director asks if art can be separated from artist

Carlo Gesualdo wrote some of the most darkly sublime music of the late Renaissance. He also savagely murdered his wife and her lover in their bed. Now be honest: which would you like to discuss first?

The art will always be secondary to the atrocity, however magnificent the madrigals and sacred music. Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, had been cuckolded by the Duke of Andria in a long-running tryst that had become the scuttlebutt at court. The premeditated double murder of 1590 was a truly grisly affair, concluding in the public display of their mutilated bodies on the steps of the palazzo for several days.

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© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

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‘Hell’s Kitchen’ Will End Broadway Run and Open Overseas

Though the show will close in New York next month, a North American tour will continue, and productions in Australia, Germany and South Korea are planned.

© Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“Hell’s Kitchen,” which won two Tonys and a Grammy, will conclude its Broadway run on Feb. 22.
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From Dylan to disco, Beyoncé to Bob Marley: the 30 best live albums ever – ranked!

Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive!, one of the bestselling live albums of all time, is turning 50. You won’t find that on this list, however: instead there’s metal, soul, and an ‘indecently exciting’ No 1 …

Already stars in Black America, Maze became the ultimate if-you-know-you-know band among British fans of underground soul thanks to Live in New Orleans. It perfectly encapsulated their appeal: smooth but not slick, an awesomely tight band making breezily relaxed music, one fantastic song after another.

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© Photograph: Larry Hulst/Getty Images

© Photograph: Larry Hulst/Getty Images

© Photograph: Larry Hulst/Getty Images

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Igor Stravinsky: Late Works album review – kudos to Reuss for bringing this spellbinding music to life

Daniel Reuss/Noord Nederlands Orkest/Cappella Amsterdam
(Pentatone)

Noord Nederlands Orkest and Cappella Amsterdam breathe colour and light into work from the composer’s most austere period

In his later years, Igor Stravinsky became fascinated by serialism, both as a means of distilling musical thought and as an intellectual and stylistic challenge for a composer entering his 70s and 80s. The results struck some contemporary listeners as austere, but there’s a self-effacing purity and beauty about this complex, intellectually probing music that deserves a wider audience than hitherto. Kudos, then, to conductor Daniel Reuss, whose precise yet vital interpretations teem with colour and light.

There are four main works here. In Memoriam Dylan Thomas from 1954 is an extended, impassioned setting for solo tenor of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Threni, a spiny, multifaceted jewel from 1958, sets words from the Book of Lamentations. The haunting Introitus and bristling Requiem Canticles, from 1965 and 1966 respectively, complete the set, interspersed with briefer pieces including an unpretentious Lord’s Prayer and the severely cerebral two-minute Elegy for JFK.

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© Photograph: Diederik Rooker

© Photograph: Diederik Rooker

© Photograph: Diederik Rooker

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‘A nasty little song, really rather evil’: how Every Breath You Take tore Sting and the Police apart

Sting and his former bandmates go to the high court over a royalties dispute this week – the latest chapter in the song’s remarkably fractious story

This week’s high court hearings between Sting and his former bandmates in the Police, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, are the latest chapter in the life of a song whose negative energy seems to have seeped out into real life.

Every Breath You Take is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Copeland and Summers against Sting, alleging that he owes them royalties linked to their contributions to the hugely popular song, particularly from streaming earnings, estimated at $2m (£1.5m) in total. Sting’s legal team have countered that previous agreements between him and his bandmates regarding their royalties from the song do not include streaming revenue – and argued in pre-trial documents that the pair may have been “substantially overpaid”. In the hearing’s opening day, it was revealed that since the lawsuit was filed, Sting has paid them $870,000 (£647,000) to redress what his lawyer called “certain admitted historic underpayments”. But there are still plenty of future potential earnings up for debate.

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© Photograph: AP

© Photograph: AP

© Photograph: AP

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Frank Dunlop, 98, Dies; Director Who Gave Theater a Free-Spirited Spin

In 1970, he founded London’s Young Vic, an adventurous “people’s theater” (the Who took the stage at one point) before shaking up the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

© Evening Standard, via Getty Images

The theater director and company leader Frank Dunlop in 1977. “Ideas, plans, suggestions issue from him like lava,” one critic said.
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