Evans claims to have gone to great lengths

The rift between Adele and her dad runs deep--Evans, 49, walked out on his daughter and her mother when Adele was only 3 years old. However, he did manage to be a presence in her life, as Adele would spend holidays with her paternal grandparents. By the time she was a teenager, their relationship appeared to have improved. Unfortunately, in 2011--at the peak of Adele's rise to fame--he spoke to the press about their difficulties. The superstar responded with fury to what she considered a major transgression by telling Vogue in 2012 she'd "spit in his face" if she ever saw him again.

Evans claims to have gone to great lengths to reinstate himself in his daughter's life--including embarrassing pleas to her management and label staff to intervene on his behalf--but Adele has been firm in not allowing him to approach her. Evans says he has never met Konecki and he longs to build a bond with his grandson. "I'm missing out on so many of the joys of being a grandfather. Simple pleasures like taking him out for a walk in his buggy," Evans lamented to the Daily Mail.

Evans notes that his daughter maintained a good relationship with his parents and was particularly close to her grandfather before he passed away in 1999. In fact, he says he learned about her pregnancy secondhand from his own mom.

With her powerful voice

Gong Linna continues to reshape folk music on the contemporary stage, Chen Nan reports.

From the day that Gong Linna became an Internet sensation for her lyricless song Tan Te, or "Disturbed", she was known as an unconventional Chinese folk singer who breaks all the rules.

With her powerful voice, wide vocal range and dramatic facial expressions, she attracts attention and gets rave reviews when she releases each new song.

Fa Hai, You Don't Understand Love, Gong's latest song - which, like Tan Te, was composed by her German husband, Robert Zollitsch - has conjured up yet another wave of attention and controversy.

First performed at the New Year's eve gala of Hunan Satellite TV on Dec 31, the new song soared to popularity overnight thanks to its contagious melody and quirky lyrics.

"Fahai, you don't understand love. The Lei-feng Pagoda will fall down," sings Gong, 38, in a white glittering dress, playing the role of White Snake, the protagonist of the Legend of the White Snake.

The song's melody and lyrics are direct and simple. After the debut performance, the song has been remade over and over by fans on the Internet. The video has been watched more than 100,000 times online.

I love This Masquerade

A big mistake would be to change what an audience knows," he cautions. "People came to hear what they know. After you finish with that, if you want to go to the moon and go crazy, that's up to you. But I learned this from Duke Ellington: once a song becomes a classic, you don't mess with it. You leave it alone. And he was right. So I leave it alone. And it works.

"I love This Masquerade, Turn Your Love Around, On Broadway. If people want to hear it, I'm happy to play it. It's a two-way street: What can I do to make them remember why they loved the song in the first place?"

In Macao as the end of an Asian tour that started in Seoul and included stops such as Singapore, Benson admits that it was his first visit to the former Portuguese enclave.

"Yesterday, I went on a long tour to see all the different aspects of the city," he recalls. "Where normal folks go to shop, the residential areas with nice houses. Then the casinos. I've never seen anything quite this extensive. Inside, you can play football and baseball in any one of them - they are massive. We have a brand new casino where I live in Scottsdale, Arizona. It's very nice, but it looks like a toy compared to this.

"When I hear (casino mogul) Steve Wynn talk, I know that he's a guy who understands. He says that he is building another casino in Vegas. He must have confidence in the future. I don't gamble myself. I'm a family man. I've got seven boys and eight granddaughters. I want to make sure that they have a couple of dollars to spend.

A hard act to match

While he was describing the opera in general terms two centuries ago, feared Vienna critic Eduard Hanslick could have been referring to Erraught's performance when he wrote: "This ... Cinderella is in fact a Cinderella in clothing only; her singing brims over with pearls, velvet and silk."

A hard act to match — and as Don Ramiro, Angelina's prince, Dmitry Korchak was almost equal to the task.

"Almost," only because his light tenor initially threatened to get lost in the orchestra. But Korchak gained in confidence — and his voice in power — effortlessly pinpointing his high C's in "Si ritrovarla io giuro," as he declared that he will find the girl who so enchanted him at the ball, no matter what it takes.

But to do so, he must get past Angelina's step-father, who keeps her in ashes while he plots the prince's marriage to one of his two daughters. As the bumbling Don Magnifico, Alessandro Corbelli was indeed Mr. Magnificent Saturday, bringing the mean and scheming persona to life in a humorously endearing way.

Weekend Rock Question

We're just two weeks away from the Super Bowl. Football is fine and dandy, but our main interest here is Beyonce's halftime show. What songs will she perform during the Destiny's Child reunion set? Will she truly sing live? Will Jay-Z come out during "Crazy in Love?"

Now we have a question for you: what is your favorite Super Bowl halftime show of all time? There's no need to stick to Madonna, Prince, Bruce Springsteen or other acts from recent years. You can go all the way back to the University of Arizona Symphonic Marching Band in 1967 or Up With People in 1980. There was even an Indiana Jones skit in 1995. Anything is fair game, but please only vote once and only for a single performance.

You can vote here in the comments, on facebook.com/rollingstone or on Twitter using the #weekend rock hashtag.

Muse Open U.S. Tour With a Bang

Muse is not a band for stripping things down. Last night at the first of three concerts at Staples Center in Los Angeles, the British trio kept its reputation intact for flash and sweeping rock gestures. It was the second night of the band's U.S. tour behind The 2nd Law, Muse's sixth studio album, and it was heavy with ambitious new songs between heroic, earth-shuddering hits from the last dozen years.

Hardly a critical favorite, Muse is frequently dismissed as a band hewing too closely to their influences and replacing subtlety with helium-fueled intensity. But they know how to fill a stage, delivering their songs with energy and obsession, performing beneath an endlessly morphing pyramid of lights, lasers and flashing images.

Muse mingled brooding electronics with epic Queen-like flourishes and an of-the-moment taste of dubstep on The 2nd Law's "Unsustainable," which opened the show. One radio hit from the new album is "Madness," performed at human-scale as a gospel/U2 hybrid, in contrast to the explosive visuals: purple and blue lasers firing above the crowd and Matt Bellamy's dark glasses, with lenses that helpfully flashed lyrics for fans to sing along to the singer's breathless, emotional reading.

Manhattan Production Music

Even if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Black Keys aren't too pleased with a Louisiana casino's commercials. The Ohio rockers have filed a lawsuit in New York federal court against Pinnacle Entertainment, who run the L'Auberge Casino Resort Lake Charles.

And Manhattan Production Music, a company that makes music for commercial advertising, claiming the companies used their Brothers track "Howlin' for You" in advertisements. The complaint alleges that a September ad for the L'Auberge Casino used music "substantially similar" to "Howlin' for You," and also claims Pinnacle used "infringing music" in an ad for another casino the following month.

If companies are unable or unwilling to secure licensing rights to popular songs, they often hire music production houses to create similar-sounding pieces of music for their advertisements. The melody or key usually sports enough variation to avoid lawsuits, but the Black Keys assert a "blatant and purposeful infringement" of copyrights in their complaint.