Message from Jamie Bernstein:

C’mon everyone — and you know who you are — if you have a memory about my dad, please share on our cool new Memory Project for Leonard Bernstein at 100. The centennial festivities begin today — on his 99th birthday!

Send your memories here to this ‘digital quilt of remembrance’.

From the international violinist, Liana Isakadze:

Dear friends. We regret to inform you that Prof. Thamaz Chachava, spouse of Liana Isakadze has passed away yesterday, during a concert of Night Serenades Festival, held in Batumi.
Funeral will be held on Thursday, August 31, in Tbilisi.

Liana Isakadze, a Georgian student of David Oistrakh, moved to France after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Her husband appears to have died during a concert at a festival she directs in Tbilisi.

 

Jan Younghusband, BBC Music’s head of TV commissioning, has announced a retrospective to mark the 30th anniversary of the death of the British cellist Jacqueline du Pré.

Younghusband said: ‘It seemed a good time to pause and reflect on Jacqueline’s career, her unique contribution to the world, and the loss we still feel in the music world now that she is not with us anymore.’

 

Let us remind those with short memories that Jan Younghusband co-produced a book and a film on the sexual abuse of Jackie by her brother-in-law at a time when her mind was disturbed by the onset of multiple sclerosis. Much of the book was factually unfounded.

From my 1997 Spectator review: ‘ I don’t think I have ever opened a tackier or more disingenuous book than this ‘intimate memoir’ of the cellist Jacqueline du Pre by her elder sister and younger brother, Hilary and Piers.’

The same Jan Younghusband now wants us to acknowledge ‘the loss we still feel’.

Horribly two-faced.

Jeremy Peaker went straight from school to work in the coal mines.

Then the miners went on strike and lives were shattered.

Jeremy won a scholarship to study at the Guildhall School of Music and has spent the rest of his life on stage.

Lovely profile in the Yorkshire Post.

 

 

Elisha Abas, the Israeli pianist and former footballer, got married this weekend in New York to  Anna Neelam Rickman.

We wish them every happiness.

Elisha is a great-grandson of Alexander Skriabin’s daughter, Ariadna, who died fighting the Nazis in France.

Full history here.