Tom Di Nardo, 89, Dies in Italy; NPR's Noah Adams Dead at 84

Tom Di Nardo, the Philadelphia music critic and feature writer, has died at 89. He was taken while on tour in Italy, according to Slippedisc and the Philadelphia Inquirer's obituary notice.

He leaves a long paper trail in a city that takes its music seriously. Di Nardo wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Inquirer, covering classical music and opera as well as jazz, according to his obituary. That range — opera on Monday, jazz by Friday — is increasingly rare in American newsrooms, where the full-time critic has become an endangered species.

Noah Adams has also died. He was 84. Adams hosted NPR's All Things Considered for 18 years, a run that made his voice one of the most familiar in American radio. Eighteen years is a long time to hold a national microphone. Few hosts manage it without becoming wallpaper; Adams, by all accounts, stayed news.

Who was Tom Di Nardo?

A critic's critic, in the old Philadelphia mold. His beat ran from the Academy of Music's orchestral programs to opera and jazz — a portfolio today usually split among three specialists or simply left uncovered. The Inquirer's obituary confirms the detail that gives his death its particular sadness: he died on tour in Italy, still traveling at 89, presumably in pursuit of the music he spent a lifetime writing about.

There are worse exits for a critic. Not many better.

What did Noah Adams mean to NPR?

Adams hosted All Things Considered, NPR's flagship evening news program, for 18 years — a tenure spanning some of the network's most consequential decades. Listeners didn't read him; they heard him, daily, at dinner time. That kind of intimacy is the whole point of radio, and Adams delivered it without ostentation.

Arts coverage figured in his repertoire too, which is why his death lands here rather than on the general news desk. A host who could carry a feature segment on music or letters was, and remains, a scarce asset.

Why do these two deaths matter together?

One wrote, one spoke. Both spent careers translating the arts for American audiences at a scale — a major daily paper, a national radio program — that has since contracted dramatically.

Their passing within days of each other, as Slippedisc notes, reads as a small fin-de-siècle for a certain kind of arts journalism: the staff critic with a pension, the broadcaster with an 18-year chair. The successors exist, but they're freelancing.

What remains is the work — decades of copy and broadcast hours — and the reminder, in the Inquirer's obituary pages, of how much coverage a city once got. Whether Philadelphia, or NPR, replaces that remains the open question.