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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. Wentz has hardly abandoned the flute though - or its early music counterparts like the traverso - but he has, since the 1990's, focused more on the conducting side of his career. In the years following, both Jed Wentz 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.
Jed 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 Jed 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 Locatelli sonatas 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. |
