Buchmann-Mehta School of Music launches masterclass platform

Tel Aviv’s Buchmann-Mehta School of Music (BMSM) has launched an online masterclass platform designed to make the school’s regular masterclasses available worldwide for free. The platform currently includes strings, brass and woodwind channels with the planned addition of piano and vocal channels.

Part of Tel Aviv University and the partner school of the Israel Philharmonic (IPO), the BMSM is designed to supply future generations of orchestral musicians and conductors for the IPO as well as soloists. Many of the artists featured on the new platform are members of the IPO in addition to a series of guest artists and BMSM alumnae.

Uri Rom, director of the BMSM, said: ‘This long-standing initiative going back to the Music School's founding director, Prof Tomer Lev and delayed in the past two years due to the COVID pandemic, has now come true thanks to a concentrated effort on the side of the School's artistic faculty and staff.’

The website’s initial offering includes masterclasses with BMSM faculty, many of them IPO members as well as with BMSM Symphony Orchestra conductor and honorary president Zubin Mehta, and guest artists including pianist-conductors Sir Andras Schiff and Christoph Eschenbach, pianist Emanuel Ax, violinists Renaud Capucon, Julian Rachlin and Christian Teztlaff, clarinettist Martin Fröst, and baritone Thomas Hampson (pictured).

The masterclasses were filmed in the BMSM's Clairmont Hall and in-house recording studio as well as in the IPO’s Zucker Hall. They are all given in English, as part of the BMSM’s International Program which offers tuition, scholarships and stipends to music students from around the world.

Founded in 2005 in partnership with Tel-Aviv University and the IPO, the school can trace its roots back to 1945, when it was established as the Israel Academy of Music. Honorary presidents have included Arnold Schoenberg and Leonard Bernstein.

You can find out more about BMSM here.

You can find all available masterclasses on the newly launched platform here.