After 18 years, Suzi Gomez-Pizzo, 64, a fast-talking native New Yorker, is retiring this month from the Met. She has garnered a reputation as a calm troubleshooter with a knack for defusing last-minute sartorial snafus. - The New York Times
“Employees continued to picket on the day after Wednesday night’s walkout when, during a Suzanne Vega concert, they protested ‘an unacceptable level of hostility and mismanagement’ by the new leadership. … On Thursday evening, the management team headed by new CEO Joseph Callahan responded by firing some employees involved.” - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
Gatti, currently chief conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden and formerly music director of the Rome Opera and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, is succeeding Zubin Mehta at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, which encompasses both Florence’s famous spring music festival and its opera house. - ANSA (Italy)
“The orchestra has informed subscribers that the contemporary music series will be ‘paused’ for the 2025-26 season. There was no public announcement or acknowledgement. The CSO series presented just two MusicNOW concerts this current season, most recently in March.” - Chicago Classical Review
“I think it’s crazy that 20 years in, we still offer music for free. We’re the only service that doesn’t have a free service. As a company, we look at music as art, and we would never want to give away art for free. - The Hollywood Reporter
“The Metropolitan Opera’s stage door, a plain entrance hidden in the tunnels of Lincoln Center, routinely welcomes star singers, orchestra musicians, stagehands, costumers and ushers. But a different bunch of visitors arrived there on a recent afternoon, carrying stuffed toy rabbits and ‘Frozen’ backpacks.” - The New York Times
Pires, 81 next month, has withdrawn from performances this week and next in three Portuguese cities. She also has concerts scheduled in Monaco on June 22 and The Hague on June 30; so far, those performances are still on, as is a July tour to Japan and Taiwan. - RTP (Portugal) (via Google Translate)
“Giancarlo Guerrero, 56, ended his 16-year tenure in May as music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, where he put an emphasis on contemporary American music and oversaw more than 20 recordings that earned him six Grammy Awards.” - Chicago Sun-Times
Some fans are disappointed that we may never see the last two rerecordings, though Swift has hinted that she might be willing to release them, in some form, one day. - The New Yorker
Algorithms, which sort the listening public into ever-more-individualized niches, can cut both ways: They can introduce you to new artists, but they can also “rob you of the variety of emotional experience.” A result, is “a hunger for a more authentic view, a more definite emotional experience than commercial country often provides.” - New York Times Magazine
The Last of Us composer Gustavo Santaolalla: "I think the fact that we kept the sonic fabric — that we didn’t do an orchestral score for the series — has been instrumental in keeping those fans of the games fans of the series, too.” - The Verge (Internet Archive)
Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that’s 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily. - The Guardian
County jails are incubators for hip-hop, especially in Broward county, which cultivated “legends like Kodak Black and YNW Melly … but the diversity of voices on Bending the Bars is a natural extension of the eclectic mix of detainees that can be found in almost any urban jail”. - The Guardian
“Arizona Opera took its search for a new leader international only to find the ideal candidate a few miles from its downtown Phoenix headquarters. The … company named Brian DeMaris, the artistic director of Arizona State University’s music theater and opera program, on Thursday to be its president and general manager.” - Arizona Daily Star (Tucson)
