Here’s the jury’s semi-final list, announced last night:

Stella Chen (USA, 26)
Timothy Chooi (Canada, 25)
Anna Göckel (France, 27)
Ioana Cristina Goicea (Romania – Germany, 26)
Luke Hsu (USA, 28)
Sylvia Huang (Belgium, 25)
Meruert Karmenova (Kazakhstan, 25)
Siwoo Kim (USA – Korea, 29)
Stephen Kim (USA, 23)
Daniel Kogan (Canada – Russia, 26)
Shannon Lee (Canada – USA, 26)
Yoo Jin Lee (Korea, 20)
Christine Lim (Korea – USA, 24)
Seina Matsuoka (Japan, 25)
Seiji Okamoto (Japan, 24)
Kyumin Park (Korea, 22)
Júlia Pusker (Hungary, 27)
Eva Rabchevska (Ukraine, 22)
Ji Won Song (Korea, 26)

 


Elly Suh (Korea – USA, 29)
Max Tan (USA, 26)
Yukiko Uno (Japan, 23)
Mio Yoshie (Japan, 23)
Vasyl Zatsikha (Ukraine, 28)

 

 

A student newspaper reports that a graduate conducting student at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music has been suspended for a year following allegations of a sexual nature. He has also been banned from setting foot on the IU campus.

More than 20 people filed misconduct reports against X through the Office of Student Conduct, students said. Some students allege they either witnessed or experienced X touch, grope or kiss male students without their consent.

Ten students talked to the Indiana Daily Student for different aspects of this article, including some who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation from X or the music world.

The 31st Dallas Opera Guild Vocal Competition has been won by Meghan Kasanders in both the jury and audience awards.

UCLA is putting on an opera about a curious friendship between the late Yehuda Nir, a New York psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, and the white sheep of the Wagner family, Gottfried Wagner.

Gottfried has made it his life’s mission to apologise for his family’s role in the Holocaust. He is an outcast from the Bayreuth dynasty. He is a well-intentioned loner.

The recent death of his aunt Verena Lafferentz, highlight the dilemma. Verena Wagner, in 1943, married a high-ranking SS officer from the Race and Settlement agency who ran a small concentration camp on the grounds of the Bayreuth estate.

That’s what the Wagner family did. One white sheep does not redeem the disgraceful flock.

Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner with ‘Uncle Wolf’

The standard protocol is for the soloist to switch instruments with the concertmaster and carry on playing the concerto on a borrowed violin until the original has been restrung, retuned and restored.

Not so in Philadelphia, where Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider declined the concertmaster’s violin in the middle of the Elgar concerto and decided to halt proceedings until his own instrument was restrung – by  associate principal second violinist Paul Roby – and ready to continue.

In the hiatus, soloist and conductor chatted amiably with musicians and audience. Szeps-Znaider picked up playing where he left off and everyone went home happy.

Szeps-Znaider told Peter Dobrin next day that, with ten minutes to go of the Elgar concerto, adjusting to a different instrument would have been disruptive both to him and to the audience.

There was another reason.

The violin he plays is a 1741 Guarnerius. It used to be owned by Fritz Kreisler. It’s the one on which Kreisler gave the world premiere of the Elgar concerto in November 1910. No other violin would do.

 

AskonasHolt are crowing over the capture of Eva-Maria Westbroek, the dominant Dutch soprano.

She was previously with German agents.