Early Music America Winter 2013 - (Page 18)

proﬁle Honeysuckle Music Music for recorders, strings, flute, guitar & chamber groups ... Recorders & accessories Jean Allison Olson 1604 Portland Ave. St. Paul, MN 55104 651.644.8545 www.honeysucklemusic.com jean@honeysucklemusic.com ClarNan Editions Historic Music by Women NEW TITLES Rosanna Marcello, 12 Cantatas for Alto Voice and Continuo Marianna Martines, In exitu Israel de Ægypto for chorus, soloists, and orchestra Barbara Strozzi, Hor che Apollo for high voice, two violins and continuo Isabella Leonarda, 3 Motets for Bass Voice and Continuo Website: www.clarnan.com Email: clarnan@sbcglobal.net Tel. (479)-442-7414 Barbara Garvey Jackson, Publisher 235 East Baxter Lane Fayetteville, AR 72701 18 Winter 2013 Early Music America Pure Gold: Beiliang Zhu A cellist from Eastman and Juilliard wins Leipzig's Bach Competition performance, followed her development 2012, a young cellist named as a master's degree student there, and Beiliang Zhu made history when she now works with her as a colleague. took ﬁrst prize in the International "One quality of her playing that's always Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig, Germany. Not only was Zhu the stood out is a very special sense of musical presence," he wrote in a recent eﬁrst Chinese national to win a prize at mail. "You know the venerable event; she instantly when she was also the ﬁrst string begins to play that this player to win the top is a compelling and prize playing a period deeply committed voice. instrument. The fact that A few years ago she parshe also received the ticipated in a workshop audience prize puts an where she performed additional seal of what to me had always "authenticity" on her been a somewhat forgetwin. Zhu has said, table sonata by one of tellingly, that the the lesser-known Bach audience award meant sons. I was sitting with even more to her than another faculty member; the jury's anointment. "For me, performing when she ﬁnished, we "I was beguiled," is a way of living, turned to each other, Robert Levin, the comnot just a way of stunned, and he said, petition's president, said earning a living." 'What was that?' Someof Zhu's playing in -Beiliang Zhu how Beiliang had transLeipzig, in a recent emuted this fairly workamail exchange. "She is day sonata into pure gold through her [an artist] of such musicality and natucomplete investment and belief in it. ralness that it was possible, even necessary, to sit back and be spoken to. Prosa- Nothing ﬂashy, nothing egotistical- simply a radiant musical presence." ic judgment seemed beside the point." One might reasonably have expected Levin, the Harvard performer-scholar who opened the Leipzig competition up the ﬁrst period string player to take the top prize at a major competition like to period instruments in 2002, praised Leipzig to have grown up in one of the "the naturalness of [Zhu's] musical gestures, her understanding of the style, the hotbeds of period performance: London, sense of rhetoric, the idiomatic bow con- the Netherlands, Boston, Paris, Montretrol, and the understanding of dance as al, etc. But Zhu was born in Shanghai in the key to shaping her performances" of 1985 and lived in that city until she music by Kirnberger, Ortiz, Boccherini, came to the U.S. as an undergraduate. Haydn, Beethoven, and, of course, J.S. (She is currently enrolled in the DMA Bach. program at the Eastman School of Zhu's talent had already made a vivid Music.) impression on this side of the Atlantic. While her mother is "very musical, Robert Mealy, director of the Juilliard and sings very well," neither parent is a School's graduate program in historical professional musician, Zhu said in a N JULY I http://www.honeysucklemusic.com http://www.clarnan.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Early Music America Winter 2013

Editor's Note
Reader Forum
Sound Bytes
Musings: Time Traveling with Instruments
Profile: Pure Gold: Beiliang Zhu
Recording Reviews
Let's put on a... Zarzuela!
A Banquet of Music 40 Years in the Serving
Honoring Krebs
Book Reviews
Ad Index
In Conclusion: Dido and Aeneas Reconsidered

Early Music America Winter 2013