The Sony label, which paid $3 million to snatch Lang Lang from Deutsche Grammophon a few weeks ago, has swooped again to sign the violinist Ray Chen, winner of the latest Queen Elisabeth competition in Belgium.

Chen, 21, was born in Taiwan, raised in Australia and schooled at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He is represented by the same CAMI management as Lang Lang and will play a limelight concert at the opening of the World expo in Shanghai, mainland China, this summer – much as Lang Lang did at the Olympics.

Ray Chen is, by all accounts, a highly promising young artist. But his signing confirms the general direction of Sony’s classical strategy. A label that shed all of its conductors and all but handful of instrumentalists is now headlined by Lang Lang, Yo Yo Ma and Ray Chen, three artists from the same country – which is the market the Japanese label is pitching for.

In a signing-day statement Ray Chen said: “I am very excited to become a Sony Classical artist and I am looking forward to this wonderful collaboration. Our joint mission is to capture the excitement, passion, and life in a performance of the finest quality and to bring them to the audiences worldwide”.

The death of Wolfgang Wagner, announced Sunday night, ends a post-war era at Bayreuth that was almost as unpleasant as the Nazism that preceded it. Wolfgang, with his brother Wieland, conspired in covering up the family’s collaboration with Hitler, which included the operation of a small concentration camp in the grounds of the Bayreuth Festival.

Any independent attempt to investigate Bayreuth’s history was stamped on by the sitting heir, who ruled the estate single-handed for half a century.

Wolfgang’s death, at 90, brings the possibility of fresh air into the stagnant festival, presently run by his youngest child Katharina Wagner and her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier in a diplomatic compromise that is unlikely to last the test of time. Wolfgang was a petty dictator, modelled on a brutal one. As a stage director he was risible, a regressive shadow of his adventurous brother.

For the best account of his regime, read Jonathan Carr’s book on The Wagner Dynasty. For news of the death, see Bloomberg Muse.