AMARA STARR EXITS BROTHER'S MANAGEMENT, CITING "ISSUES"

The statement, sent to five outlets at 6:04 a.m. on Friday from an address that had not, in six years, sent anything before 9, is two sentences long. It reads, in full: "Effective today, I am stepping down from management of my brother's career, due to issues I will not be discussing publicly. Luca has my love, and he will always have my number." There is no letterhead. There is no signature block. There is a single-line CC to a Loudoun County estate attorney and, cryptically, to the general inbox of the Kennedy Center.

Amara Starr is twenty-one. She has managed her brother since he was seven and she was fifteen, first from a spiral notebook on the family kitchen table, then from a metal folding chair in the hallway of a Fairfax rehearsal studio, later from a small office above a florist on H Street where the sign on the door read only A. STARR, INQUIRIES, and, for the last two years, from a two-person outfit in Brooklyn with a lawyer, an accountant, and no other clients. She turned down, by her own count, one hundred and forty-two representation offers before her nineteenth birthday. She once refused a Netflix documentary crew entry to a green room by standing in front of the door and doing, for forty-five minutes, absolutely nothing else.

There is no announced successor. There is no interim. The word issues, plural, unqualified, deliberately vague, and, in the sisterly grammar of the Starr family, almost certainly load-bearing, is doing more work in that sentence than any single word in the classical press this year.

Three people who worked with the tour, none of whom would speak on the record, described the past fortnight in nearly identical language: a disagreement, at the hospital, that neither sibling has walked back. One person, a stage manager who has toured with them since 2013, said the disagreement was about the Symphony tapes, whether to release them at all, whether to destroy the second reel, whether to put a locked drive in a Loudoun County safe deposit box and let a thirteen-year-old decide, at some later age, what a thirteen-year-old had meant. Another person, closer to the family, said it was about the funeral, the order of the program, and a piece of music Amara wanted played that Luca, in the ICU, shook his head at, once, and would not explain. A third, whose account is the hardest to source and the hardest to shake, said it was about a phone the paramedics returned to Amara at the scene, and a message on the phone, and a decision she made about the message without waking her brother up.

None of the three agreed on which of those stories was true. All three agreed the siblings have not been in the same room since the twenty-third of November, the night, it is worth noting, that June Starr was buried, and the night Luca was moved out of the ICU and into a private recovery wing paid for, in cash, by a person who has asked to remain unnamed in every document that mentions them.

Attempts to reach Amara Starr for this article were declined through counsel. A representative for Luca Starr, who is still recovering at the family home in Loudoun County, said only: "Luca is thirteen. He is not commenting. He asks that you not ask him to." A follow-up question, whether he would like the Symphony tapes released, was met with a longer pause and then the same sentence again, more slowly.

The management line remains, for now, unattended. Emails to the existing address bounce with a two-word autoresponder that almost certainly wasn't drafted this week: I'll answer. Nobody, this week or next, has any reason to believe she will.