4VF News – Daily News Channel

Gossip magazines are reporting a sex-tape showing New Zealand opera singer Teddy Tahu Rhodes is making the rounds.

The 47-year-old baritone, who is in a relationship with Australian TV actress Lisa McCune, allegedly appears in a sex video with an unknown woman.

The video is thought to have been filmed some years ago, because Rhodes appeared without some of his more recent tattoos.

It is said to show Rhodes and a brown-haired woman having intercourse, and has been leaked to Woman’s Day and New Idea magazines, which reported yesterday on the explicit footage.

New Idea reported McCune was shocked, but her representatives declined to comment.

McCune, 43, is starring with Rhodes in an Australian musical production of The King and I in Melbourne.

The pair became an item in 2012, while they were both married to other people.

Rhodes, a Christchurch-born former accountant, began his rise to operatic stardom in the 1980s.

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– Stuff

Nervous, says Bridget Douglas, is not exactly the right word to describe how she feels about her part in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven festival in which all nine of the composer’s symphonies will be played in a row, in Wellington and again in Auckland.

“No, not nervous – excited and apprehensive,” says Douglas, the orchestra’s principal flautist.

“I feel like we can pull it off but we want to make it the best we can, memorable and special. Anyone can play Beethoven but we want to take it beyond that. They’re such masterpieces you want to bring them to life and show Beethoven’s music and life journey through the symphonies.”

Douglas, like other members of the orchestra, has played Beethoven symphonies individually many times before, but never one after the other, a total of almost six hours of symphonic music, honed with almost two solid weeks of rehearsal. Douglas believes hundreds of people have booked in both Auckland and Wellington to see all nine.

“People are excited about this, and in the orchestra world it’s wonderful for the players, like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and at the same time quite daunting. For me, as a flute player, Beethoven’s symphonic music is wonderful, beautiful gems of solos and then part of the texture.

“He wrote nothing for flute outside the symphonies, so generally this is my chance to connect with a great composer, and same for the wind and brass.”

The conductor for the ambitious Beethoven lineup is the NZSO’s music director, Pietari Inkinen, who conducted Wagner’s epic, 15-hour, Der Ring des Nibelungen for Opera Australia last year. He anticipates momentum building with each symphony.

Every conductor wants to put their own stamp on the music, says Douglas, “and Pietari’s always sure, never a namby-pambiest”.

“I see him looking back to the world’s legendary Beethoven conductors, like Bernstein and Carlos Kleiber, but a whole lot of them, like Herbert von Karajan. I can see he’s got that impression, at the same time bringing a freshness to the way we play, challenging us not to go on auto-pilot, especially with the fifth.

“That’s probably one of the most famous pieces in the world with its opening four or five notes. When you’ve played it over and over you might play the way you’ve always done it. With Beethoven there’s a tension in the music and if you’re too comfortable I think you lose the point.

“There was so much frustration in Beethoven’s life. He started losing his hearing during the second symphony, very early in his symphonic writing and was profoundly deaf by number nine.

“He was an absolute genius, up with Mozart in a completely different way. How can you start to guess at his processes He was ground-breaking in his time and there’s nothing cliched or hackneyed about them today. You feel something when you play them.”

And, even though that means listening to them over and over, she says, “they still have an incredible effect. All famous classical pieces in music are famous for a reason”.

With the rest of the orchestra, Douglas has been rehearsing from 9.30am to 3.30pm each day.That might sound, she says, like a short day’s work, “but it’s quite intense. If we tried to plan for more, I don’t think anything good would come of it. It’s a full week-and-a-half of intense rehearsal. Even though we’ve played these pieces before we haven’t played them with Pietari”.

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It’s one thing, she says, to focus on the music as an individual, “but we have to come together to see how everything fits together and figure out what should be background and foreground. You physically have to look at each other as much as possible to get the feeling of ensemble”.

If anyone can sail through a Beethoven marathon, it’s Douglas.

Her whole life is lived at top speed. She is a working mother with two small daughters.

“It’s important for anyone to have a balance in life.

“My family is a great reality check. It’s a whole other world,” she says.

But she also performs as a member of the contemporary music ensemble Stroma and the woodwind quartet Zephyr, is half of the piano/flute duo Flight and plays with other “pop-up” groups from the NZSO.

“For me to be a well-rounded, happy musician, I can’t do just one type of music. I need that variety.”

THE DETAILS

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – Beethoven: The Symphonies, Michael Fowler Centre. Tomorrow, 6.30pm, Symphonies 1, 2 and 3; Friday, 6.30pm, 4 and 5; Saturday, 7.30pm, 6 and 7, Sunday, 3pm, 8 and 9. –

She also teaches music and mentors students.

Douglas, 43, joined the NZSO 17 years ago as associate principal flautist and became principal in 2000.

– The Dominion Post

The magical Disney On Ice show is back to our shores this year and Stuff has tickets to give away.

So many things were shocking about Brad Pitt getting punched in the face by a deranged prankster at the Los Angeles premiere of Maleficent last month.

The brazen, senseless hostility of the act, for one. Not to mention that the same self-described “journalist” had recently pulled another stunt at the Cannes Film Festival, when he crawled under a full-skirted gown worn by actress America Ferrera.

The one thing that wasn’t shocking about the assault Pitt suffered was that his fianc

They say everyone’s a critic, but when it comes to judging the best picture books in the country, we have asked the true experts.

Negotiations for a second Eagles concert are under way after fans snapped up all 30,000 tickets for the Auckland show this morning.

The tickets for the show on March 14 at Mt Smart Stadium sold out in a matter of minutes, and an announcement about a potential second show will be made this week, Frontier Touring says.

The Eagles last played in New Zealand in 1995 as part of their Hell Freezes Over tour – named because when the band broke up in 1980, founding member Don Henley said they would play together again “when hell freezes over”.

The present lineup is Henley and fellow founder Glenn Frey, along with longstanding members Joe Walsh and Timothy B Schmit.

Founded in 1971, the Eagles have sold more than 150 million records and have notched six Grammy awards.

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– Stuff

From Rick in The Young Ones to the grotesque but curiously familiar Alan B’stard, every one of Mayall’s comedic creations were over-the-top and unforgettable. Here’s our pick of some of the finer moments of Mayall-inspired mayhem:

Blackadder: Lord Flashheart’s Grand Entrance
“Flash by name. Flash by nature … Woof!” With his brains in his codpiece and manic exuberance, Mayall’s turn as Lord

A sign welcoming visitors to windy Wellington has received a Transylvanian transformation to promote a new movie starring Jemaine Clement.

With a slight alteration, ”Wellington” was adorned with a blood-red V to become ”Vellington” in a nod to What We Do in The Shadows, a vampire mockumentary directed by Taika Waititi.

The $80,000 ”blown away” sign is a homage to the capital’s blustery conditions and

She has the self-styled moniker of Queen Bee and now she has a Royal Reign. Ridiculous Probably. But, rapper, Lil’ Kim is hardly known for being understated or conforming to convention.

The 39-year-old’s first born, a girl named Royal Reign, was