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1 St. Sophia Church ©WFIMC 2 Harbin´s Baroque Quarter ©WFIMC 3 Street in the Baroque Quarter ©WFIMC
4 Old Synagogue (1909), renovated 2014 and made into a concert hall ©WFIMC 5 Chinese lanterns and Russian Dolls: Harbin´s Baroque Quarter ©WFIMC
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THE SCHOENFELD SISTERS AND HARBIN
Born in Maribor (in what was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the time) in the 1920s, Alice and Eleonore Schoenfeld grew up in Berlin and came to prominence at a young age. After the Second World War, they emigrated to the United States, where they settled in Los Angeles and restarted their performing careers. At the same time, they began to teach at the University of Southern California, alongside iconic artists such as Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky and William Primrose. A distinctive feature of the Schoenfeld sisters’ careers was their interest in China. Following the visits of Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin in 1979, the sisters began to travel to China as well, establishing many contacts while performing and teaching in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities. They also invited countless Chinese students to the US and later helped them build their careers. One of them was the Chinese violinist Suli Xue, who came to study with Alice Schoenfeld in 1986 and later became a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the first Chinese American violin professor at USC. Today, Xue is also President and Artistic Director of the Schoenfeld International String Competition. He was instrumental in bringing the competition to his hometown Harbin, thus making it part of a growing number of musical institutions of this Chinese “City of Music”.
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69TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY
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