At a gala in New York, the orchestra recognized two of his daughters, who are underwriting a scholarship to its academy.
Good morning. It's Thursday. Today we'll find out how two of Nat King Cole's daughters came to underwrite a scholarship for the Vienna Philharmonic. We'll also get details on the arrest of a Columbia University student by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents -- and her release, after Mayor Zohran Mamdani mentioned her case to President Trump.
Daniel Froschauer, a first violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic who is also the orchestra's chairman, had a one-sentence explanation for why songs that he and his colleagues had never played before were in their music racks last night. "For no other American popular entertainers would we be so happy to break tradition," he said.
The entertainers he was talking about are Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole. The songs in the music racks were their hits, including "Unforgettable" and "Mona Lisa."
They are unusual additions to the repertoire of the stiffly formal orchestra that premiered the "Blue Danube" waltz by Johann Strauss Jr. and symphonies by Brahms and Bruckner. But the foundations named for Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole and run by Casey Cole and Timolin Cole -- twins who are the youngest of his five children -- are underwriting a scholarship that will send an American student to the orchestra's academy.
And so the Vienna Philharmonic Society, the New York-based nonprofit that raises money for the orchestra in the United States, asked if musicians from the orchestra would play an arrangement of the Coles' hits at its gala in Manhattan last night. The orchestra also invited the two sisters to its white-tie ball in Vienna last month.
"That ball, they call it the Super Bowl of the balls," Casey Cole said.
She and her sister waltzed -- one with Froschauer, the other with Michael Bladerer, the orchestra's managing director.
"When we were younger, we went to cotillions," Casey Cole said. "We had to have all of those dances under our belts. But when we first got on the dance floor there, it was ‘Oh, I think I’m going to step on someone’s foot.’"
"Muscle memory took over," Timolin Cole said.
Casey Cole said that underwriting the scholarship reflected the "shared belief that music education is important."
"This is about investing in the future at a pivotal moment in a young artist's life," she said.
The scholarship broadens the reach of their foundations, which they set up "as a direct response to the lack of music education in the schools" in the United States. "There was a drought," she said.
The orchestra's academy was intended to provide training and experience for music school students. "We started the academy because they were getting people they said were fantastically adept at moving their fingers or opening their mouths and blowing into their instruments, but they had no soul," said Marifé Hernandez, the chairwoman of the Vienna Philharmonic Society. "It wasn’t the Viennese sound. They told me it was the Viennese feeling that produces the Viennese sound." Three Americans who have gone through the academy's two-year cycle are now full-fledged members of the orchestra, she said.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
"It's a starting point. It's the best starting point they've ever put out there." -- Jaren Forbes, a rental tenant in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, who planned to testify at Mayor Zohran Mamdani's first "rental rip-off" hearing for tenants' complaints. Forbes said he wanted to talk about leaky windows and an unresponsive 311 system.
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Columbia student arrested by ICE is released
Just before sunrise on Thursday, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained a student in a residential building owned by Columbia University.
Columbia's acting president soon said that the agents had acted under false pretenses, having entered the building by saying that they were looking for a "missing person." A state assemblyman said that university officials had told him that the agents presented themselves as plainclothes officers from the Police Department. They showed the building superintendent a poster or flyer for a missing child, said the assemblyman, Micah Lasher, a Democrat who represents Upper Manhattan.
Federal officials identified the student who was arrested as Elmina Aghayeva, an Azerbaijani who they said was in this country illegally. She posted a photo on Instagram showing her in the back of a vehicle with the caption: "Dhs illegally arrested me. Please help."
The case quickly escalated. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he had brought up the arrest in a meeting with President Trump at the White House. The mayor said on social media that he had spoken with the president by telephone after the meeting and that Trump "informed me that she will be released imminently."
She was, about 40 minutes later. The university said on social media that it was "relieved and thrilled" that she had been released.
Her arrest came after months of relative calm on the Columbia campus and appeared to be the first incursion by immigration officers into a university building in nearly a year. Mahmoud Khalil, who had finished his coursework at Columbia and was about to graduate, was detained in the lobby of his university-owned apartment building in March 2025. Khalil, who had a green card, was released from detention on bail but is still fighting deportation.
Columbia requires that law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant to enter private areas on its campus, including housing facilities and classrooms. It appeared that a judicial warrant was not used in this case according to Columbia. Lasher said that once the superintendent realized that the visit was not about a missing person, he called campus security officials who then called the Police Department.
Aghayeva, 29, appears to have been in the country since at least 2016. She lived in Connecticut and North Carolina before moving to New York City to attend Columbia where she was a senior in the School of General Studies majoring in neuroscience and political science. She married Garrett Blackburn an American citizen who lives in North Carolina in 2020. But they separated four years ago and are not in regular contact he said.