̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - David Trippett

Vice-Chancellor’s awards showcase ̽��ֱ��’s societal impact and public engagement

ta385 — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 14:54:26 +0000

Now in their fourth year, the awards were made in four categories: collaboration, early career, established researcher/academic champion and professional service.

Winners in the collaboration category included PhD student Christoph Franck for an initiative creating a global air pollution sensor network driven by citizen science.

̽��ֱ��early career researchers included Jessica Miller whose project has changed understandings of mental health and trauma in UK policing, informing a new wellbeing service and leading to discussion in Parliament.

Among those commended as established researchers, Vincent Gnanapragasam developed a new tool to predict an individual’s prognosis following a prostate cancer diagnosis to help make decisions about the value of treatment. In a very different field, David Trippett was recognised for bringing an ‘indecipherable’ opera back to life through international performances, broadcasts and recordings.

In the professional services category Naomi Chapman from the Polar Museum Education team developed maps to enable young and partially sighted people to explore the Arctic and Antarctic by touch.

̽��ֱ��announcement was made at a prize ceremony held at the Old Schools on 14 October 2019.

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, says: “This year’s nominations recognise impressive and inspirational individuals, and strongly reflect our mission to engage the public, tackle real-world problems and improve people’s lives. ̽��ֱ��award scheme focuses attention on the increasingly important role that institutions such as ours have to play in restoring faith in experts.”

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor’s Research Impact and Engagement Awards were established to recognise and reward outstanding achievement, innovation and creativity in devising and implementing ambitious engagement and impact plans that have the potential to create significant economic, social and cultural impact from and engagement with and for research. Each winner receives a £1,000 grant to be used for the development and delivery of engagement/impact activity or relevant training.

This year’s winners are:

Collaboration Award

Emily Mitchell (Department of Earth Sciences)

Researchers and museum specialists collaborated on a museum exhibition and public programme, engaging a range of public audiences with research on the earliest fossils to illuminate the start of complex life.

Helen Strudwick ( ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum)

This collaborative project engages audiences with our pioneering research on ancient Egyptian coffin construction and decoration, through a major exhibition, ‘Pop-Up’ museum targeting underserved audiences and digital resources.

Open-Seneca

Open-seneca is a student-led initiative creating a global low-cost mobile air pollution sensor network driven by citizen science. ̽��ֱ��aim of the initiative is to empower citizens with air pollution data to raise awareness, initiate behaviour change, and inform policy makers on environmental issues. ̽��ֱ��team are: Christoph Franck, Charles Christensen, Lorena Gordillo Dagallier, Sebastian Horstmann, Raphaël Jacquat and Peter Pihlman Pedersen.

Early Career Award

Saumya Saxena (Faculty of History)

Saumya’s research focuses on family law and gender in India. She advised the twenty-first Law Commission of India on reform of family law and worked with the Verma Commission on amendments to law relating to rape in India.

Jessica Miller (Department of Sociology)

Jessica’s project involved engaging with over 18000 police officers and staff to change the face of trauma resilience in UK policing, and inviting commitment from decision-makers to inform national policy and operational change.

Matthew Agarwala (Bennett Institute for Public Policy)

Matthew’s research on valuing natural resources is helping in the transition to sustainable economic growth. Having been adopted by the United Nations and other bodies, his work is shaping standards for measurement.

Zoë Fritz (School of Clinical Medicine)

Zoë’s research around resuscitation decisions led to the development of the ReSPECT process (“Recommended Summary Plan for Emergency Care and Treatment”), which has replaced problematic ‘DNACPR’s with tremendous impact on policy, practice, guidelines and beneficiaries.

Established Researcher and Academic Champion

Nicholas Thomas (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)

In 2018, Nicholas co-curated the landmark exhibition 'Oceania' at the Royal Academy in London. Based on collaborative research at Cambridge, the exhibition brought a dynamic, contemporary view of the art of an extraordinary region to European audiences.

Vincent Gnanapragasam (School of Clinical Medicine)

Vincent is the Chief Investigator for PREDICT Prostate, the first individualized prognostic tool accessible to both clinicians and patients to help make unbiased informed decisions about the value of treatment for newly diagnosed prostate cancer.

David Trippett (Faculty of Music)

An unheard opera by 19th-century composer Franz Liszt languished silently in a manuscript thought fragmentary and illegible. David’s meticulous reconstruction brought it to life, to global acclaim, through international performances, broadcasts and recordings.

Professional Service

Oliver Francis (Centre for Diet and Activity Research, and the MRC Epidemiology Unit)

Oliver’s leadership in communications has transformed the impact strategies at CEDAR and the MRC Epidemiology Unit. His innovative contributions span all aspects of the communications and impact portfolio.

Naomi Chapman (Scott Polar Research Institute)

With a local artist, Naomi developed innovative maps of the Arctic and Antarctic with which hundreds of young and partially sighted people have enjoyed a touch tour of polar research.

Twelve students, academics and professional members of staff from across the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have received Vice-Chancellor’s Research Impact and Engagement Awards in areas as diverse as prostate cancer, family law, museum public engagement and police mental health.

This year’s nominations recognise impressive and inspirational individuals, and strongly reflect our mission to engage the public, tackle real-world problems and improve people’s lives

Professor Stephen Toope

Candy Welz

Airam Hernández and Joyce El-Khoury perform Sardanapalo at Staatskapelle Weimar

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Music to the ears: Liszt’s lost opera

ehs33 — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 13:48:34 +0000

Liszt's lost opera heard for the first time in 170 years

Abandoned Liszt opera finally brought to life - 170 years later

sjr81 — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:01:43 +0000

David Trippett, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, first encountered the opera languishing in an archive in Weimar more than ten years ago. A trailer with extracts of the opera being performed can be seen by clicking on the link above.

Known only to a handful of Liszt scholars, the manuscript – with much of its music written in shorthand and only one act completed – was assumed to be fragmentary, often illegible and consequently indecipherable.

However, after Trippett spent the last two years working critically on the manuscript, a ten-minute preview will now be performed for the first time in public as part of the world-famous BBC Cardiff Singer of the World contest in June.

“In 1849 Liszt began composing an Italian opera, but he abandoned it halfway through and the music he completed has lain silently in an archive for nearly 170 years,” said Trippett. “This project is about bringing it to life for the very first time.”

“ ̽��ֱ��music that survives is breath-taking – a unique blend of Italianate lyricism and harmonic innovation. There is nothing else quite like it in the operatic world. It is suffused with Liszt’s characteristically mellifluous musical language, but was written at a time that he was first discovering Wagner’s operas.

“ ̽��ֱ��only source for this opera is a single manuscript containing 111 pages of music for piano and voices. It was always assumed to be impossible to piece together, but after examining the notation in detail, it became clear Liszt had notated all the cardinal elements for act 1. You have to think through the artistic decisions traceable in the manuscript and try to reconstruct the creative process, to see how Liszt’s mind went this way and that.”

A critical edition of the music for act 1 will be published by Editio Musica Budapest (Universal Music Publishing) in 2018. Although Trippett has worked alone on rescuing the music Liszt notated, Cambridge’s Francesca Vella has worked on deciphering the Italian text alongside musicologist David Rosen, whose principal role has been to translate the libretto into English.

̽��ֱ��libretto, based on Lord Byron’s tragedy Sardanapalus, tells the story of Sardanapalo, King of Assyria, a peace-loving monarch, more interested in revelry and women than politics and war. He deplores violence and brutality, and, perhaps naively, he believes in the innate goodness of humankind, but is overthrown by rebels and burns himself alive with his lover, Mirra, amid scents and spices in a great inferno.

A ten-minute scene from the opera will be performed at the final of the BBC Singer of the World event by Armenian soprano and rising talent Anush Hovhannisyan.

“In effect, the manuscript has been hiding in plain sight for well over 100 years,” added Trippett. “It was written for Liszt’s eyes only, and has various types of musical shorthand, with spatial gaps in the manuscript. A lot of it is very hard to read, but the scruffiness is deceptive. It seems Liszt worked out all the music in his head before he put pen to paper, and to retrieve this music, I’ve had to try and put myself into the mind of a 19th-century composer, a rare challenge and a remarkable opportunity.

“Fortunately, Liszt left just enough information to retrieve what was evidently the continuous musical conception he had at the time. We will never know exactly why he abandoned his work on the opera and I suspect he would have been surprised to learn that it is resurfacing in the 21st century. But I like to think he would have smiled on it.”

Ahead of the BBC event in June, Trippett and his colleagues are putting the finishing touches to a documentary film for the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge chronicling the resurrection of Liszt’s forgotten masterpiece, with singers Anush Hovhannisyan (soprano), Samuel Sakker (tenor) and Arshak Kuzikyan (bass-baritone). This will be released on 15 May.

“Who else gets to premiere a new opera by a superstar composer from two centuries ago?” said soprano Hovhannisyan. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and the entire process of making it work – from thinking about the character and what Liszt would want – has been a privilege. We have had a wonderful, deeply creative and imaginative time piecing this together and I feel very blessed to have been a part of it.”

An Italian opera by Franz Liszt – which lay incomplete and largely forgotten in a German archive for nearly two centuries – will be given its world premiere this summer after being resurrected by a Cambridge academic.

̽��ֱ��music that survives is breath-taking. There is nothing else quite like it in the operatic world

David Trippett

Abandoned Liszt opera brought to life

Tom Andrews/ ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Anush Hovhannisyan (soprano), Samuel Sakker (tenor), and Arshak Kuzikyan (bass-baritone) record the trio finale with pianist and musicologist David Trippett, in Jesus College Chapel, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike