A.Z. Madonna

A.Z. Madonna has reported on and reviewed classical and pop music for the Boston Globe since 2015. After a year as a freelancer, she joined the Globe staff on Halloween 2016, and nine days later reviewed the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the night Donald Trump won the U.S. Presidential election. She currently curates the Globe's ongoing "Press Play" series, which offers friendly guides to niches within classical music including minimalism, music children will probably like, and opera tunes you probably know even if you've never seen an opera in your life.

Her favorite subjects she has written about for the Globe to date include Red Sox organist Josh Kantor, some of Massachusetts's last remaining accordion repair technicians, and the annual relay run between Symphony Hall in Boston and the gates of Tanglewood in Lenox. She was also on "Jeopardy!" once, where despite dominating in the so-called "dreaded opera category," she couldn't remember that Manhattan was an island during Final Jeopardy.

During her senior year at Oberlin College, she was named the 2014 winner of the Rubin Prize in Music Criticism. Her work for the Globe is sponsored in part by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.