Announcing the EUYO's Summer Tour 2022, with concerts across Europe devoted to Peace

The EUYO embarks on a major Summer Tour to Austria, Germany, Italy, Poland and The Netherlands featuring two orchestral residencies, eight symphonic concerts, five chamber music, community and late- night performances, four special Peace in Europe concerts, and the world première of Nexus by Hannah Kendall. The Orchestra will tour with conductors Gianandrea Noseda and Gustavo Gimeno, and soloists Renaud Capuçon, Jae Hong Park and Francesco Piemontesi.

THE PEACE IN EUROPE CONCERTS

As a cultural ambassador for the EU, the Orchestra plays a key role in promoting peace in Europe. Its young musicians embody the EU principle of Unity in Diversity, and offer tangible evidence that the best hope for harmony in Europe is through promoting youth, culture and co-operation.

At one of the most challenging moments for Europe in many decades, the Orchestra launched a Peace in Europe project in March 2022 and has performances in countries across Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the border of Ukraine, in concerts dedicated to the cause of peace in Europe, highlighting the plight of victims of violence.

After the first concerts in Italy, Finland and on the sacred island of Delos, Greece earlier this year, the series continues with performances in Berlin on 8 August, Grafenegg on 18 August, Lusławice on 21 August and Amsterdam on 26 August.

THE RESIDENCIES & TOUR

The EUYO’s 40-day Summer Tour 2022 involves an Orchestra of 111 musicians from all the 27 EU Member States, the players living and performing together, with public events in Austria, Germany, Italy, Poland and The Netherlands.

The tour starts with an orchestral residency in Grafenegg, Austria, the Summer Home of the Orchestra, where the EUYO is Orchestra in Residence at Campus Grafenegg. Here the EUYO musicians will have the opportunity to work and rehearse the concert repertoire with 12 expert international instrumental tutors and EUYO Rehearsal Director Peter Stark. During the residency there will be Musiclabs on mental health with mental health coach in residence Dinka Migić-Vlatković, and a one in which the EUYO Management Team will lead a workshop exploring the importance of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals for tomorrow's professional musicians in Europe. 

THE ARTISTS 

The tour sees the welcome return of Gianandrea Noseda, Musical Director of the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington DC), one of today’s most sought-after conductors, who has had an enviable relationship with the EUYO since first conducting the Orchestra in 2010. EUYO alumnus Gustavo Gimeno, Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg and who was recently appointed to the same role at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, makes his conducting debut with the EUYO.

The Orchestra is delighted to welcome back the great French violinist Renaud Capuçon, also an EUYO alumnus, who first performed as a soloist with the Orchestra in 2009 and who joins the Orchestra in Grafenegg, Berlin and Bolzano. The second part of the tour sees two pianists performing with the Orchestra: rising star South Korean Jae Hong Park, 22-years old and already a winner of a vast array of international piano competitions, and acclaimed Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi, who has performed in many of the most important venues of the world, last appearing with the EUYO in 2015.

THE MUSICAL PROGRAMME 

The Summer Tour programme features the world-première of Nexus by British composer Hannah Kendall, originally commissioned in 2020 by the European Broadcasting Union for its 70^th anniversary, and also as part of the EUYO’s Beethoven’s Mirror project. Nexus presents a fascinating mosaic of sound, interweaving songs from the African diaspora with quotes from Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony, distilling a variety of musical languages and orchestral textures, and tracing musical roots back in a way that connects Beethoven’s Vienna with the then contemporary anti-slavery movement.

The rest of the Summer 2022 symphonic repertoire features music almost entirely  from the opening years of the twentieth century. As part of The Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s Year of Polish Romanticism marking the 200^th anniversary of the publication of Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz's Ballads and Romances, the Orchestra performs a late Romantic work by Mieczysław Karłowicz, The Sorrowful Tale (Preludes to Eternity). Igor Stravinsky is featured with the Scherzo fantastique and Sacre du printemps, both written only a few years after the Karłowicz, yet both inhabiting a very different sound world.

The same can also be said of Richard Strauss' imposing Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, and the French repertoire present in all these concerts: Ernest Chausson's Poème, Camille Saint-Saëns' Havanaise, and Maurice Ravel’s La Valse and Piano Concerto in G. Only Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini sits outside of this historical period, referring back to Paganini’s early nineteenth century style in a piece composed in 1934.

The Orchestra’s informal free chamber music performances in Grafenegg, Bolzano and Amsterdam offer the opportunity to hear an extraordinary variety of music: from an arrangement of Gioachino Rossini’s witty overture from The Barber of Seville to the radical sounds of Living Room Music by John Cage, the Latin-American Aires Tropicales of Paquito D'Rivera, the plaintive Ukrainian folk song by Edmond Agopian, and music by seven women composers from three continents: Clara Schumann, Jennifer Higdon, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Jenny Peña Campo, Jessie Montgomery, Hannah Kendall and Grazyna Bacewicz.

“2022 will surely be remembered in Europe for decades to come as the year that Europe’s peace was once again tragically shattered”, commented EUYO Secretary General Marshall Marcus, “In this context, we offer the Orchestra’s Summer 2022 Tour programme not simply as a series of inspiring performances by some of young Europe’s most talented musicians, but also as reminder of our need to work together and not against each other, and how, with art, culture and young people, this can be achieved.”