Jed Wentz & Artem Belogurov
Biography Jed Wentz & Artem Belogurov
Jed Wentz
The American flutist and conductor, Jed Wentz, began his flute studies with Walter Mayhall in Youngstown, Ohio, and continued studying with James Walker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied both modern and historical flutes at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music with Robert Willoughby and Michael Lynn. He continued studies with Barthold Kuijken at the Royal Conservatory of Music in the Hague, where after three years he received a Soloist's Diploma.
Jed Wentz appeared regularly in the USA and Europe as a soloist and recitalist in the 1980's. He began his career as a virtuoso flutist but gradually turned to conducting. He has performed and recorded with groups such as Musica Antiqua Köln, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Capriccio Stravagante Paris and the Gabrieli Consort. In 1992 he founded the Holland-based early music ensemble Musica ad Rhenum (Music on the Rhine) and has appeared as soloist or conductor with them in numerous concerts throughout the world. In the years following, both Jed and his ensemble attracted much attention, regularly performing at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and other major venues in Holland, as well as at many European festivals and numerous locales in the USA.
Mr. Wentz is on the faculty of the Amsterdam Conservatory where he teaches traverso and is a frequent lecturer at London's Royal Academy of Music. Since the 1990's, he devoted much time as well to the understanding and implementation of historically informed music practices. During the 1990's he wrote authored a series of scholarly articles examining 18th century performance practices. He has published articles in Early Music, Concerto, and Tijdschrijft voor Oude Muziek. He is pursuing his doctorate through Leiden University, with his research centering on the relationship between 18th-century staging and tempo in the tragedie en musique.
As a soloist and conductor Mr. Wentz has made well over 20 recordings for a variety of labels, including Vanguard Classics, Brilliant Classics, and Challenge Classics. His first recordings appeared in the early 1990's, and include the critically acclaimed 2-CD set of J.S. Bach sonatas (Vanguard Classics), as well as the Concerto Alla Rustica and other concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. Some of Musica ad Rhenum's members appeared in his early recordings. In 1995 the Fondazione Cini Venetia awarded Wentz a prize for the best recording of Italian music for his Pietro Antonio Locatellisonatas disc (Vanguard Classics). In the new century he remained active as a conductor and soloist, as well as a teacher. Among his most later recordings is the 2006 release on Brilliant Classics of the complete flute sonatas of Michel Blavet.
Artem Belogurov
Known equally for his “verve, wit, and delicatesse” (Boston Musical Intelligencer) and his “infinite tenderness” (Evening Odessa), Artem Belogurov has an extensive repertoire, ranging through four centuries of solo and chamber works. His interest in period performance leads him to historical keyboards, including clavichord, harpsichord, and fortepianos spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a soloist and in chamber groups, Artem has performed in a wide variety of venues, among them Lincoln Center, Library of Congress, Jordan Hall, Harvard Musical Association, the Universität der Kunste in Berlin, the Musikhochschule in Hanover, St Andrews University in Scotland, Tivoli Vredenburg in Utrecht, and Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. His critically acclaimed album of solo piano works by the late nineteenth century American Romantic composers, recorded on a Chickering piano built in 1873, was released by the London-based label Piano Classics in 2015. 2019-2020 season includes a North American tour with Concerto Köln as a soloist and continuo player, performances with his duo partner cellist Octavie Dostaler- Lalonde and with the early music ensemble Postscript, of which he is a founding member. Artem won first and second prizes at international competitions in the Netherlands, Germany and Japan. After studying modern piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Artem moved to Amsterdam where he studied fortepiano and clavichord at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam with Richard Egarr and Menno van Delft and graduated receiving cum laude in 2016.
