Fresh news from the Turkish Cultural Foundation that the young opera singer Önay Kağan Köse is the recipient of the 2014–2015 Ahmet Ertegün Memorial Scholarship. Köse has won the scholarship for the fifth time and in this coming year will be studying under Dr Robert C White Jr, a professor of Classical Voice at The Juilliard School. Between November 19 and 23, Köse will sing the lead in Rossini's Il Turco in Italia at Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater. In the past, he has performed in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Wolf-Ferrari’s Le Donne Curiose and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, all at Juilliard.
The Ahmet Ertegün Memorial Scholarship was launched by The American Turkish Society in the memory of the founder of Atlantic Records and the society’s long-time chairman, Ahmet Ertegün (1923–2006). From a childhood in a Turkish residence in Washington to moving to New York to his death at a Rolling Stones concert in 2006, Ertegün’s life was indeed a fascinating one. Thomas Roueché reviews the first major biography of Ertegün, The Last Sultan, in Cornucopia 47.
Main image shows Ahmet Ertegün and his brother Nesuhi at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C., ca. 1940. Photo: WikiMedia Commons.