Professor of Flute Michel Debost is Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award by National Flute Association By Marci Janas '91
			Professor of Flute Michel Debost has amassed an abundance of riches since emigrating from France in 1989. August 2001 marks another milestone in his illustrious career; the National Flute Association (NFA) honored the world-renowned flutist with its lifetime achievement award for significant, lasting contributions to the flute world. The award was presented during the NFA's 29 annual convention, held in Dallas, Texas, August 16-19. More than 2500 flutists from around the world were in attendance. Many people have asked Debost through the years why he left Paris, where he had succeeded Jean-Pierre Rampal at the Paris Conservatoire--and served for 20 years as the Orchestre de Paris's principal flutist. He once told a reporter: "The part of Ohio where Oberlin is, O.K., it's flat, O.K. there's countryside, but I was looking for that and I found a lot of riches there." At Oberlin, Debost is the Robert W. Wheeler Professor in Performance. With his wife, Kathleen Chastain (teacher of wind chamber music and flute), he oversees the summer Oberlin Flute Institute, an annual program that attracts more than two dozen high school and college students from the United States and abroad. His former flute students--from Oberlin and from the Paris Conservatoire--have gone on to richly rewarding careers. Debost is consulting editor for Flute Talk, for which he writes a monthly column. This year Oxford University Press is publishing the English version of his French book, The Simple Flute. Among the awards garnered by his many album and CD recordings is a Grammy nomination for his Telemann duets with James Galway. Debost continues his annual tours in his adopted country as a soloist--as he has done every year since 1963--and gives a recital in Oberlin each year "just," he says, "so people know that despite my very large age, I can still play the flute a little." After studies at the Conservatoire de Paris with Jan Merry, Gaston Crunelle and Marcel Moyse, Debost's career in France took off when he began winning every major flute competition there is to win--in Moscow, Prague, Geneva, Munich and Turin. At the Orchestre de Paris, he worked with music directors Charles Munch, Herbert von Karajan, George Solti and his good friend Daniel Barenboim. If Debost has found riches in America, then the Oberlin Conservatory of Music has found riches in Debost.
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