Tino Gagliardi has won a three-year term as president and executive director of the NYC Musicians' Union Local 802, the largest local union of professional musicians in the world. His election, which was unopposed, represents a fourth time around … » Read

As the pandemic takes its third curtain call, the Broadway theater world once again faces cancelled shows and closings as performers test positive and submit to quarantine. The one positive note to this sorry situation is the long overdue … » Read

General Manager Peter Gelb greeted the audience at the premiere of the new  Rigoletto  on New Year’s Eve at the Metropolitan Opera. Among other things, he said announcements would no longer be made that singers would perform … » Read

Musicologist and arts administrator Paolo Pinamonti is to be the next artistic director of the Macerata (Italy) Opera Festival for three years, starting next summer, with Tosca featured on the schedule. He succeeds Barbara Minghetti, in the job … » Read

Silicon Valley’s big tech firms have long been considered tight-fisted when it comes to supporting the arts in California’s Bay Area. Some recent examples to the contrary—an unsolicited $10,000 donation from the software company … » Read

Sandra Jaffe, who with her late husband Allan founded Preservation Hall in New Orleans six decades ago, died on Dec. 26 at age 83. A Philadelphia native, she and her husband were returning from their honeymoon in Mexico in 1961, when they stopped … » Read

Composer/arranger/conductor Stephen J. Lawrence, who wrote over 300 songs and scores for Sesame Street , died on December 30 in Belleville, N.J. He was 82. No cause of death was reported. For his 30 years of work for Sesame Street he was awarded … » Read

Dominick Chenes made quite a splash earlier this year when he jumped in at 24-hour’s notice for an ailing colleague in Seattle Opera’s Tosca , but the 37-year-old lyric tenor has never been afraid of a challenge. I first came across … » Read

It seems only appropriate that Osmo Vänskä begins his final year as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra with a three-week Sibelius Festival that features all seven of the symphonies as well as two versions of the Violin Concerto … » Read

Orchestras can use a range of strategies to engage Spanish-speaking and other multilingual audiences, including artist and repertoire choices, targeted outreach activities, and multilingual websites. For some, the last of these can be … » Read