"Costanzo is a rare blend of artistic star power and equally starry connections, entrepreneurial intuition, and business savvy. He’s just the sort of triple threat who could bring opera in Philadelphia out of what’s been looking like a death spiral." - Philadelphia Magazine
"(She) was working on a sequel to her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain when she died in 1960. That sequel, The Life of Herod the Great, will be available in January 2025. The manuscript had been in Hurston’s archives at the University of Kansas, accessible only to scholars." - The Guardian
Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer are both staff curators at the Whitney; Guerrero is the museum's first curator devoted specifically to Latinx art, while Sawyer's field of expertise is photography. - ARTnews
Over the next six years, Nézet-Séguin will conduct four or five operas each season, including new works — such as Mason Bates's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Missy Mazzoli's Lincoln in the Bardo, and Huang Ruo's The Wedding Banquet — and standard repertoire such as Mozart, Puccini, and Wagner's Ring cycle. - OperaWire
“Martines began her remarkable career at just 16. At 38, she became the first female composer programmed by the Society of Musicians, whose elite concert series also gave Beethoven his Viennese performance debut. But after her death, in 1812, Martines’s music mostly fell silent.” - The New York Times
Arlen was “a Viennese musical prodigy who fled to the United States after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and became a music critic and a late-in-life composer of Holocaust and Jewish-exile remembrances in song.” - The New York Times
Sasha Skochilenko, released in the multi-country, multi-person prisoner swap, was serving seven years for substituting price tags in a grocery store with messages like, “The Russian Army bombed an art school in Mariupol where about 400 people were seeking shelter.” - The Atlantic (MSN)
Why? It’s a mystery. “A Banksy fan who raced to the artwork’s location as soon as it was revealed on social media said she thinks it’s a commentary on humans destroying the natural world.” - ARTnews
The Annenberg report: Of the top 100 2023 films, the numbers are grim - from the 99 that had no Native or Pacific Islander women to the 39 without Black women. Why the backsliding? - HuffPost
"Arts organizations across Miami-Dade County have been left to their own devices ... to deal with the cuts in funding, and in many cases, that means making cuts of their own. … Arts groups in the county are nevertheless discussing ways to collaborate and make their resources go further together." - The Miami Times
How did The Great Gatsby get excitement for its cast album flowing? TikTok, of course - and also YouTube, Instagram, and X/Twitter, not to mention a party for influencers on all of these channels. Brand strategy: Snag the kids now, and it’ll pay off later. - The New York Times
No, this doesn't mean the breaking competition. This is free performance before 13,500 spectators at the Trocadéro Champions Park, where the Algerian-French hip-hop choreographer's latest work combined hip-hop with circus arts, visual arts and martial arts. - AP
One program delivered lazy, sexist jokes and couldn’t be trained out of its ways. So that’s going great - but researchers keep saying it will improve. - BBC
Sharon’s Tristan und Isolde opens March 9, 2026 with Lise Davidsen as Isolde. The Ring begins with Das Rheingold in spring 2028, continues with Die Walküre and Siegfried in 2028-29, and culminates with Gotterdämmerung in 2029-30. Davidsen will sing Brünnhilde, and there will be complete cycles in the spring of 2030. - AP
