Friends and colleagues are stunned at the sudden death of Katy Jones, from a brain haemmhorage.
Katy was appointed two years ago to head the Ten Pieces project, the BBC national teaching campaign for ten works of classical music. A former investigative journalist who uncovered important truths about the Hillsborough soccer disaster, she commissioned more than 130 programmes for BBC Learning over the past four years.
Our sympathies to her husband, Mike Spencer, and their children.
UPDATE: Families of the Liverpool FC Hillsborough victims pay tribute here.
The anti-abuse campaigner Ian Pace has written a powerful, personal article in the current issue of Music Teacher magazine on the need to safeguard students of all ages at music institutions. Here’s a sample:
From those I encountered during my own
musical education, I know of at least
four suicides – not to mention other
lives plagued by alcohol and drug abuse,
chronic depression and more. Clearly,
responsibility for such problems does
not lie entirely with the institutions,
but it is vital that colleges take the
emotional wellbeing of their students
more seriously.
Those who enter specialist music
education are made immediately aware
of the privileged world they are entering,
and of their limited chances of achieving
career success. Such a situation creates
an aura around those who teach them
and who, to some extent, hold some of
the keys to that success.
I will be forever
haunted by the stories of the violin
teacher who would tell his 14-year old
female students how he was the one
person who realised their true potential,
but could only help them realise this if
they demonstrated their total trust and
faith in him, which would be followed
by a suggestion that they strip naked to
play in front of him. On other occasions,
fully aware of their vulnerability and
insecurity at that age, he would devise
means of reducing them to tears at the
beginning of a lesson, in order to take
them on his lap seemingly to comfort,
but in reality to abuse, them.
The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, bouncing back from bad times, is forming a formidable artistic team.
It has now added Pekka Kuusisto, the Sibelius winner to a top table comprising the pianist Jeremy Denk, clarinettist Martin Fröst and two other violinists Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Thomas Zehetmair. Pekka, 38. says the new job ‘gives me reindeer-bumps.’
That may sound better in Finnish.
‘I am not a candidate,’ he told the Morgenpost at the season launch of the Berlin State Opera. His dismissive comment is confirmed by El Pais.
Barenboim yesterday, checking suits with Jürgen Flimm.
(Can we have some comments on the suits?)
A nameless singer attending Sunday’s awards has been sharing its highs and lows. Her lowest of the low…. this may come as a surprise… was the me-me-me speech by the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera.
Read here.
And more failures here.
Already head of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, Bartoli has been announced as artistic director of a new baroque ensemble, Les Musiciens du Prince, at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo.
She has signed on until 2021.
A fellow of the Royal College of Organists and an associate of the Royal School of Church Music received a four-month suspended prison sentence after police found 29 images of boys aged 14 to 16 on his computer.
John Barnard is presently suspended as head of choir at John Keble Church, Edgware. He is a retired French and German teacher at London private school Godolphin and Latymer.
