Monday’s (2/2) Telegraph (London) includes an unsigned obituary of conductor Israel Yinon, who collapsed and died while conducting a youth orchestra performance in Lucerne, Switzerland, on Thursday. Yinon “was a champion of composers who were silenced by the Holocaust… Yinon … made his career in Germany, coming to prominence with the first recording of Ullmann’s symphonic works, which won him the German critics’ recording prize in 1993. He cemented his standing later that year with a concert of music by composers from Theresienstadt (or Terezín), the Nazis’ showcase prison camp, which was broadcast simultaneously on BBC Two and Radio 3…. Israel Yinon was born on January 11 1956 in Kfar Saba, north of Tel Aviv, in Israel, and studied at Tel Aviv University and at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem with Noam Sheriff and Mendi Rodan…. Yinon was midway through Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony—the point at which the music reaches the mountain summit—with a student orchestra from the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts, when he collapsed on the podium. The concert … was abandoned, as was the second performance. He is survived by his girlfriend, who was playing with the orchestra at the time.”
Posted February 2, 2015
