The maestro and his opera academy in Suzhou

Riccardo Muti's training program makes first China landfall with weeklong experience that is already changing young Chinese lives, Chen Nan reports.

When 83-year-old conductor Riccardo Muti reflects on his musical training, he is proud of his teachers, especially Antonino Votto (1896-1985), the Italian conductor who was Arturo Toscanini's assistant at Milan's Teatro alla Scala. Muti, who is one of the world's preeminent conductors, has led some of the most important orchestras in the world, including the Berliner Philharmoniker, the New York Philharmonic, and the Vienna Philharmonic.

"Toscanini knew Verdi. Toscanini played under Verdi at the premiere of Otello. So there is a lineage. All the things that Votto taught me, you don't find in the books," says Muti, who was born in Naples, and graduated from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan.

With the goal of passing on what he learned from his teachers, he launched the Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy in 2015, the first round of which was held in Ravenna. Since then, talented young musicians and an audience of music lovers from all over the world have participated in the annual program, which has been hosted in cities around the world, including Milan, Seoul and Tokyo.