Manchester Police, investigating sex offences at Chetham’s School of Music, have charged Wen Zhou Li with one count of raping a teenaged girl at Chet’s and two of indecent assault. Wen also taught at the Royal Northern college of Music.
He was arrested last February and has been bailed several times before charges were finally brought.
Wen, 59, who will appear in court on October 16, was something of a poster boy for the school in its bid for international students. Presumptions of innocence apply, pre-trial.
We warned last week that there would be more after Gianandrea Noseda quit in Turin, Riccardo Muti left Rome Opera and Nicola Luisotti called time on San Carlo in Naples.
Next to go is Daniele Rustioni, 30, one of the bright young talents on the Italian scene. He has resigned as music director of the Teatro Petruzelli in Bari, Italy’s fourth largest opera house. He’s furious that to productions have been chopped from his season. He will leave in January.
New psychological variations on a vital theme. Read here.
The WSJ journalist and musician was captured and executed by Islamists in Pakistan 12 years ago. Enlightened men and women in 132 countries are taking part in an initiative to sustain the human spirit and destroy the forces that cut short the life of a decent, innocent man.
Read what you can do here. Then do it.
The last time we saw art like this, Stalin was its centrepiece.
The resent work by Andrei Budaev shows the giant Putin being lionised by, among other heroes, the genocidal Hafez al-Assad of Syria and the Belarus kleptocrat Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko.
Archive film has been released of the day Clara Haskil was admitted to the Légion d’honneur.
Click here to watch the procession of admirers.
h/t: Frédéric Gaussin
Interesting reflections on the non-death of Sigmund Freud by the president of Wesleyan University. Read here.
PRESS RELEASE
Mayor’s Music Fund hands out £1.5m to help gifted young music-
makers reach their potential
70 talented young Londoners are to be awarded four-year music scholarships to help them develop their skills as musicians, in the latest round of awards being presented by the Mayor’s Music Fund at a City Hall ceremony on Thursday 25 September.
Established in 2011 by the Mayor to help talented children from disadvantaged families fulfil their musical potential, these latest scholarships sees the amount handed out by the charity reach £1.5m.
Awarded to young people from London’s 32 boroughs this year’s scholarships are worth £280,000 and will enable each child to be given an extensive programme of music tuition and support that they would not otherwise be able to afford. It brings the total number of primary school children to benefit from the scholarship scheme to 300.
As Mayor’s Music Scholars, students get over two hours of learning, music-making and other developmental activities every week, plus lots of opportunities to perform and to attend concerts and live gigs. Crucially, each child has a personal mentor, who is the link between the child and parent, school, music service and the Fund.
Mayor’s Music Fund Chief Executive Ginny Greenwood comments: ‘The Mayor’s Music Fund is proud to be at the forefront of providing financial support to thousands of children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, ensuring that they are given the opportunity to benefit from music provision of the highest standard, with the plethora of progression routes this opens up for them.’
It is well documented that the intellectual and emotional development of a child is enhanced through learning a musical instrument. It fosters an appreciation that enriches everyday life and also sparks creativity; it involves intense engagement, self-discipline, and teamwork and it uses dynamic ways of thinking which stimulate the parts of the brain which improve memory. This is why musically trained children will often perform better in general intelligence skills such as literacy, numeracy and verbal reasoning.
Ginny Greenwood adds: ‘One theme runs through the comments from the children and their families and that’s the sense of pride they have in being a Mayor’s Music Scholar. For many of the children, this is the first time they have excelled at anything. Shy, nervous,some recently arrived in the UK, these obstacles melt away when they’re given the support and encouragement to make music with a group of other children all wanting their talent to shine through.’
The Mayor of London Boris Johnson comments: ‘Not every child can afford an instrument or the lessons they need to make real progress as musicians and the Music Fund is doing vital work to help hundreds of gifted youngsters towards realising their ambitions and achieve their full potential. In addition, as they develop as musicians these scholars are also gaining extra skills and experience that will be invaluable in all areas of their lives.’
The latest Mayor’s Music Scholarships will be presented by concert pianist and TV presenter James Rhodes, in a special ceremony sponsored by the Trinity College London. James Rhodes says: “I am so thrilled to have been invited to speak at the Mayor’s Music Fund’s awards celebration. The charity does vital, life-changing work that inspires and nurtures our next generation of musicians at a grass-roots level, which is just what we need.”
Attendees will include representatives of the music industry such as AEG Live, BMG Chrysalis, Live Nation and Warner Music, together with the Mayor’s Music Fund chairman Veronica Wadley and other supporters of the charity.
Sidney Shicoff, born 1920 in New York to an immigrant baker from Kiev, became a cantor at Catskills resorts and at various synagogues. He died of a heart attack in 1965, aged 45. His son was an operatic tenor who came close to being named director of the Vienna state Opera.
An orchestra of Armenian musicians has planned a calendar of 100 events to mark the genocide of their people by the Turkish state in 1915, an event that remains officially unacknowledged by most of the world.
Click here for schedule.
They have also recorded a CD.
Let us never forget.
press release:
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A fully restored 1933 Model A Steinway piano, the last to be owned and played by George Gershwin, will be unveiled by the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance at a free public concert Oct. 10.
The piano was donated to the school in 2013 by Marc Gershwin, George’s nephew, as a crowning gesture of partnership between the Gershwin families and U-M during the creation of the U-M Gershwin Initiative. Announced last year, the initiative provides U-M with complete access to the Gershwin archives to develop the George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition—the only scholarly edition of the Gershwins’ music—as well as student performances, new courses and scholarly symposia of national reach and impact.
The concert will be held at 8:30 p.m. in Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor. Featuring a wide spectrum of music by George and Ira Gershwin, the multi-disciplinary concert, performed by students and faculty, will highlight the piano and reflect the many genres at which the Gershwins’ excelled—including classical music, jazz, opera, musical theatre and dance—all of which have renowned performance programs at SMTD. Included will be some of the Gershwins’ most celebrated works, such as “Three Preludes,” selections from “Porgy and Bess,” and the first performance of the critical edition draft of “Rhapsody in Blue,”featuring the original jazz orchestration from the work’s 1924 debut by the Paul Whiteman Band.
In addition, audience members will learn about the piano restoration from Robert Grijalva, director and assistant professor of piano technology, who oversaw the project, and Mark Clague, associate professor of musicology and editor-in-chief of the George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition.
We regret to report the death today of Christopher Hogwood. He was 73 years old and died at his home in Cambridge after a long illness.
Hogwood, who started out on the harpsichord with Neville Marriner’s Academy of St Martin in the Fields in the early 1960s, broke away to form his own Academy of Ancient Music. It soon became the most prolific of early music bands, recording the complete symphonies and concertos of Mozart and other composers for an awakening market on Decca.
Always personable, if at times a little haughty, Hogwood matched Marriner in his understanding of the value of brand. He was identified chiefly with the AAM until quite late in his career, when he took a post in Switzerland and explored some 20th century repertoire.
PRESS RELEASE
24 September 2014
Christopher Hogwood, conductor and founder of the Academy of Ancient Music has died
The Academy of Ancient Music is deeply saddened to announce the death of Christopher Hogwood CBE, conductor, musicologist, keyboard player and founder of the Academy of Ancient Music.
Christopher Hogwood passed away on 24 September 2014.
Christopher Hogwood studied keyboard at Cambridge University with Rafael Puyana and Mary Potts and later with Zuzana Růžičková and Gustav Leonhardt. He worked with most of the leading symphony orchestras and opera houses in the world. Once described as “the von Karajan of early music”, he is universally acknowledged as one of the most influential exponents of the historically informed early-music movement. He was equally passionate about music of the 19th and 20th centuries: with a particular focus on the Early Romantics and the neo-classical school where he applied the same rigour and supreme musicianship to all his work, striving to discover and to recreate the composer’s intentions both in notation and performance.
Christopher Hogwood founded the Academy of Ancient Music in 1973, rapidly establishing a place at the forefront of the period-instrument movement. Over the following 30 years he directed the AAM on six continents and made over 200 CDs, including the first-ever complete cycle of Mozart symphonies on period instruments as well as many other first recordings of baroque and classical masterworks by a period orchestra. His iconic recordings include the 1980 recording of Handel’s Messiah with Emma Kirkby and James Bowman which was named by BBC Music Magazine one of the top 20 recordings of all time and the BRIT award-winning recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
Other previous roles include being a founder member of the Early Music Consort and keyboard player and soloist with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, artistic director of the King’s Lynn Festival, artistic director of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, a tutor at Harvard University, Principal Guest Conductor of the Kammerorchester Basel, Honorary Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and Andrew D.White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University in the USA.
Honorary President of the AAM, Christopher Purvis CBE commented: “Christopher had extraordinary generosity of spirit. He was a great ambassador for historically informed music, the movement of which he was a founder. And he was happy to see the orchestra he founded develop and grow after he stepped down as director.”
Music Director of the AAM, Richard Egarr said: “I am deeply saddened by the news of Christopher’s passing. Christopher provided a fantastic legacy for me build upon when I joined as Music Director in 2006 and I know he will be greatly missed by all who knew and worked with him.”
Chairman of the AAM, Terence Sinclair said: “Christopher made music and made friends with equal, infectious enthusiasm. He changed our lives.”
Christopher Hogwood, 10 September 1941 – 24 September 2014
