As a teacher, I have always had a special fondness for the Young Euro Classic Festival in Berlin. Perhaps that's because in my daily work I'm constantly engaged with young people who are still very much finding their way, discovering their talents and preparing for a future that they themselves don't yet know exactly what it will look like. Young Euro Classic does something similar, but with young musicians from all over the world: it gives them not only the chance to make music, but also places them on an international stage, before an audience that meets them as accomplished musicians.
For 27 years now, the festival has brought international youth orchestras to Berlin during the summer months. As far as I know, there is no other festival that has been doing this consistently on this international scale for so long. In a classical music world where attention is so – perhaps even too – often focused on established names and soloists with long careers behind them, Young Euro Classic has chosen for more than a quarter century to make room for those at the beginning of that career. That is what makes this festival unique in my view: not just that it showcases young talent, but that it has been doing so for so long, so systematically and on such a large scale.
What strikes me every time is how accessible those young musicians remain. After a concert you find yourself standing next to a nineteen-year-old violist who enthusiastically tells you about the journey his orchestra made to get here, or you get into conversation with a conductor who is barely older than some of my students at the end of their secondary education. There is no gap, no entourage, no distance that I sometimes experience with established names. You just talk to young people who happen to make fantastic music – and who seem to enjoy the conversation afterwards just as much as the concert itself.
Of course, the level is not unimportant, and it's not as if every orchestra or every soloist is equally convincing. Sometimes you hear a performance that is still searching, a tempo that just doesn't convince or a balance that still needs to mature. That's part of the concept: these are musicians who are still very much in development, not finished products. But that's precisely what makes it interesting to listen to these concerts as a critic: not with the question "is this flawless?", but with the question "where will this musician, this orchestra, be in five years?" That's a different standard than with an established orchestra, and I think the festival rightly chooses that approach.
Because when you listen to these young orchestras, you also notice how vibrant classical music can be when young people bring their energy, ambition and personality to it. You hear how they try to develop as individuals while also experiencing that an orchestra demands something different than individual virtuosity. Listening to each other, responding, adapting, taking responsibility for the whole: that too is making music. No one can shine alone. A beautiful solo passage only has meaning when it becomes part of a larger musical story.
What makes that interplay even more special is the scale on which it happens here. During the festival, hundreds of young musicians are at the same time walking through the same streets, foyers and rehearsal rooms. Encounters happen by chance, on a terrace or by an instrument, and end at a language, a country or a musical tradition. For a moment, Berlin becomes the meeting point of a young musical generation that extends all across Europe – and far beyond. You would never find that energy in a hall with only seasoned professionals in the same way.
That openness is also reflected in the programming. Young Euro Classic does not shy away from contemporary repertoire: world premieres or first performances in Germany or Europe regularly appear on the program, works that young orchestras must conquer just as much as a symphony by Brahms or Shostakovich – without the support of a long performance tradition. That commitment to new music is also rewarded: the festival presents a composers' prize every year. For me, that is one of the clearest signals that this festival wants to give a stage not only to the future performers of classical music, but equally to the future voices that will write its repertoire.
What strikes me equally is who sits in the hall. Classical music is still too often associated with a greying audience, and that picture is often accurate at many concerts. At Young Euro Classic it's different. Among the regular subscribers there are noticeably many young people: fellow students of the musicians on stage, peers who play an instrument themselves, young people who come to a classical concert for the first time precisely for that reason – "he's the same age as me". That young perspective in the hall reinforces what's happening: it doesn't feel like one generation playing for an older generation, but like a generation recognizing itself, both in the musicians and in the hall.
And that's precisely why it bothers me that this concept has found so little following. Why doesn't a similar initiative exist in Belgium? We have excellent conservatories, young orchestras of high quality and halls that would be perfectly suited for it. What's missing then? I suspect it's not talent, but rather an institution willing to support such a project for years – with structural funding, a permanent venue and the patience to make it, like the Konzerthaus in Berlin, a tradition.
That is ultimately why Young Euro Classic remains so important to me. The festival shows not only what young musicians can do today. It gives us – perhaps more importantly – the chance to listen to what classical music could become tomorrow.
This year I'm attending the festival for the seventh time, but for the first time I'm planning a large part of my summer vacation (August 2-10) around the festival: days of listening, observing, writing and talking with musicians and organizers. On Klassiek Centraal, reviews of the concerts I attend will follow over the coming period, supplemented by conversations about the place of young musicians in today's classical music world – and what we can expect from them, and what they can expect from us.