Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
This fascinating and bold concert featured the works of the ‘word man’ and the ‘note man’, and their absurdist radio play Words and Music

A few months before he died, Morton Feldman told a radio interviewer that he considered Samuel Beckett to be “a word man, a fantastic word man” and that he, Feldman, always thought of himself as a note man. The two worked together twice, first on an opera and then, in 1987, on Words and Music, an absurdist radio play that Beckett repurposed with Feldman’s music. Their mutual sympathy was apparent in Sheffield Chamber Music festival’s affectionate staging of the latter, which occupied this concert’s second half.

Before that, however, the juxtaposition of a minimalist Beckett monologue with one of Feldman’s classic uncoordinated scores laid bare their deep artistic synergy. Rockaby, a desolate exploration of ageing and isolation, was the opener. Directed in the round by Vicky Featherstone, the rigid protagonist – a magnetic Siobhán McSweeney – revolved in her rocking chair, listening and occasionally responding to her own recorded voice. It was hard not to sense the heavy hand of dementia behind the singsong fragments and the fading woman’s desperate final quest for human connection.

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Cannes film festival: The great Russian director’s first film for almost a decade is tremendous drama following the ill-deeds of a mini-oligarch who comes up with a toxic new way to feed Russia’s war machine

Life during wartime is the theme of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film. It is set in provincial Russia, a portrait of a nation paralysed with disillusionment and fear, slowly coming to terms with, or retreating into collective denial about, the terrible mistake in Ukraine. It’s an inspired variation on Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle from 1969, mixed with Gogol’s Dead Souls and the 14 sacrifices required for the Minotaur in Greek myth. It is also a noir thriller of infidelity and vengeful murder, lent a new meaning by the context of deadly cynicism and political bad faith, a world in which powerful people, gloomy with self-hate, have made covering up misdeeds their way of life.

There is a telling early scene in which the male lead, mini-oligarch businessman Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), goes out for an expensive restaurant meal with his boorish plutocrat friends and their spouses and girlfriends, including Gleb’s elegant, beautiful wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) who is almost catatonic with unhappiness. One girlfriend there tells a racy joke about a guy applying for a job on an adult movie, despite having a tiny penis unlike all the other well endowed applicants – because, he says, “all films need anti-heroes”. Minotaur is full of anti-heroes.

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Refn’s film eludes definition as it moves through time and space, from doomy reality to strange dream worlds populated by quasi-Lynchian characters

The title’s first word should probably be “His”. Nicolas Winding Refn has returned to Cannes with a bizarre new fantasia moodscape, a midnight movie of fear and dreamy disquiet, meaning … what, exactly? The setting of the film – a twist on the 60s pulp shocker of the same title by Norman J Warren – morphs and shapeshifts from place to place, with the antilogical procedure of a dream, from a supposedly real outer world to the inner space of hallucination and memory. It starts in a giant, empty hotel (whose colossal Stygian corridors are not unlike those in Refn’s Only God Forgives) in the middle of a digitally rendered dystopian city, wreathed in the kind of mist that tends to conceal a serial killer, and people here are frightened of someone called the “Leather Man”.

We move to the fictional action of a movie the hotel’s inhabitants are (possibly) planning to make, or perhaps to the world of their fears and imaginings, their ideas occasioned by this ostensible realist premise. And then we move to a situation from the past in US-occupied postwar Japan, where a haunted GI is looking for his daughter. This is a story populated by quasi-Lynchian characters and gargoyles with strange nicknames – the whole imagined landscape, lit by Refn’s throbbingly neon purples, reds and blues, looks like a nightclub in hell. And yet it is less violent and explicit than his earlier adventures. The pace is doomy, sepulchral and slow; like Refn’s TV series Too Old to Die Young, it moves at the pace of a zombie which has been shot but still keeps on shuffling forward. Or perhaps it is more like that of a sleepwalker who walks and talks slowly, but has a clearer idea of what is happening than those who are, in a more banal sense, awake.

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• West Ham will need to raise more than £100m if relegated

• Relegation could force England player to reassess future

Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United are interested in Jarrod Bowen as rival clubs prepare to capitalise on West Ham’s financial problems by targeting their best players.

West Ham will need to raise more than £100m if relegated from the Premier League and there is growing interest in Bowen from a host of top sides.

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Gartner has warned that SAP users adopting its AI agents could face spiraling costs as the vendor moves to a new commercial model. Last week, the German ERP giant announced plans for its Autonomous Enterprise, including an AI platform for building and governing a suite of agents that do business work. With the new platform comes a new commercial model in which SAP no longer charges according to how many users are authorized to access the platform, but by the value agents offer by completing "actions." SAP has confirmed to The Register that AI Unit purchases are estimated based on the expected number of "agent actions for an autonomous domain." The company promised to introduce "Autonomous Domain Blueprints" that would help estimate costs in so-called "T‑shirt size guidance" indicative of the customer's scale of deployment. However, a recent paper from Gartner warns: "Depending on how SAP defines an 'action,' the number of events incurring fees risks quickly spiraling upwards. This would lead to unexpectedly increased costs, especially if SAP continues to charge higher unit prices for AI Units used in excess of the customer’s contractual commitment, or if AI agents consume a digital access license. Moreover, the value a customer derives from an executed action might not match how SAP has priced that action." Victoria Rowan, Gartner senior principal analyst, is lead author of the report, "First Take: SAP Moves to Higher-Value-Based AI Pricing, but Potential Cautions Remain." The research outfit has promised to update its analysis as SAP publishes more details about its pricing model. It is also waiting for a response to a fact review from the company. SAP provides ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that help run some of the world's largest companies, including Walmart and VW Group. Over the past five years, it has been trying to get customers to move to the cloud and off legacy software. More recently, it has made a big push for AI adoption. In its research, Gartner said users need to take care in how they cost AI adoption with SAP, which provides AI Units as a commercial metric. "The AI Units customers purchase are converted to the license metric of the particular SAP Premium AI services they consume. SAP's contracts give SAP the ability to alter the conversion factors, meaning SAP could end up charging more during the term and at the point of contractual renewal," the paper says. An SAP spokesperson said conversion rates were intended to reflect the usage of the applicable AI features. "Any changes to conversion rates would only take effect upon renewal for existing customers, as further described in the applicable AI Units order form." Gartner also pointed out that there was a lack of "clear definitions of how the customer-built agents' work will be measured." While this remains the case, "it will be difficult to predict and control runtime costs." The SAP spokesperson said the runtime metrics for Joule Studio – SAP's agent builder platform – had not yet been disclosed. Announcing SAP's Business AI platform last week, CEO Christian Klein promised customers could unlock new sources of revenue and make "meaningful cost savings." Gartner advises users thinking about adopting SAP's AI platform to review their existing contracts to check whether they have price-protection clauses for their SAP Cloud applications, such as S/4HANA. They should also get a baseline for the conversion of AI Units by obtaining a copy of the current SAP AI Services List from the SAP Trust Center and reviewing the current conversion factors. ®

Het is de eerste keer in de democratische geschiedenis van Spanje dat een oud-regeringsleider verdacht wordt van corruptie. Voor huidig premier Pedro Sánchez is de zaak een nieuwe smet: Zapatero geldt als een van zijn vertrouwelingen.

Emoties over walgelijke criminelen zijn begrijpelijk, maar ook walgelijke criminelen hebben het recht op een menselijke behandeling.

Jonathan Andic was de enige getuige toen zijn vader Isak in 2024 van een klif viel. De Spaanse politie denkt nu dat hij zijn vader, waaarmee hij een moeizame relatie zou hebben, heeft vermoord.

There have been plenty of memorable off-track moments in Montreal – here are some of the most viral from previous Grands Prix.

McLaren team boss Andrea Stella has identified a unique sidepod concept used by Red Bull.

Rights defenders described Lantratova as “a different type of figure” than her predecessor: a young careerist shaped entirely by the current political system.

CARY (ANP/AFP) - Het populaire spel Fortnite is terug in de App Store van Apple. Het onlineschietspel werd in 2020 verwijderd, nadat ontwikkelaar Epic Games had geprobeerd om het betaalsysteem van Apple te omzeilen. Epic Games wilde met een eigen betaalsysteem voorkomen dat Apple bij zogeheten in-app-aankopen van spelers een commissie zou opstrijken. Maar omdat dit tegen de regels van Apple was, werd het spel verwijderd.

Epic Games en Apple zijn hierover al jaren in een juridische strijd verwikkeld. Dat het spel nu terugkeert in de App Store is omdat Epic Games ervan overtuigd is dat de techreus niet lang meer deze commissie kan blijven eisen, schrijft de spelletjesmaker op de website. Epic Games zegt "vol vertrouwen" te zijn dat het de rechtszaak tegen Apple wint.

"Fortnite is terug in de Apple App Store nu de laatste ronde in de rechtszaak tussen Epic en Apple nadert", zegt topman van Epic Tim Sweeney op X.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - LTO Nederland is kritisch op een Europees plan om boeren te helpen met de stijgende prijzen van kunstmest. De Europese Commissie maakte dinsdag bekend voor de zomer geld vrij te willen maken voor boeren die het hardst getroffen worden door de hoge kunstmestprijzen, die het gevolg zijn van de afsluiting van de Straat van Hormuz.

Het geld daarvoor moet worden vrijgemaakt uit het bestaande landbouwbudget. De land- en tuinbouworganisatie heeft "lage verwachtingen bij de effectiviteit hiervan, omdat die middelen nu juist al onder andere worden ingezet voor vergroening van de land- en tuinbouw en compensatie dus ten koste zal gaan van deze maatregelen", aldus LTO.

Volgens LTO is de meest voor de hand liggende oplossing tegen de stijgende kunstmestprijzen om dierlijke mest beter te benutten. Die optie laat de Europese Commissie volgens LTO echter buiten beschouwing. De organisatie stelt dat hierdoor een onnodige afhankelijkheid van kunstmest in stand blijft.

Series of illustrations for the article "The Universe Before the Universe"

The fake courtesy machine is a wooden hand-cranked contraption that types “I hope this email finds you well” over and over again. Jacquard loom & player piano vibes.