Around the Music Festival

The Southwark Court of Appeal in London recently found British conductor Jan Latham-Koenig guilty of three counts of attempting to communicate sexually with a child and sentenced him to 14 months in prison (suspended for two years). He was arrested at Victoria Station this past January after using a dating app to contact someone he believed to be 14 years old, when in fact the communication was with an undercover police officer.

Latham-Koenig was born in 1953 and is 70 years old. He studied conducting at the Royal Academy of Music in London and has since served as Music director of the Opéra national du Rhin, based in Strasbourg, France (1997-2002), music director of the Teatro Municipal de Santiago in Chile (2007-2010), and artistic director of the Symphony Orchestra of Flanders in Belgium (2013-2019) .

He has also served as Principal Conductor of the Novaya Opera Theatre of Moscow since 2011, and in 2014 received the “Golden Mask” award, the greatest honor in Russian art, for his performance of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”. In 2020, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his contributions to music and cultural relations between the U.K. and Russia.

In 2022, he was named Music Director of Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Argentina, known as the best opera house in South America. During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many Western artists suspended their activities in Russia, but Latham-Koenig continued his conducting activities, attracting much social attention.

PHOTO：Teatro Colón