EUYO Frontrunners is our online series for the musical leaders of tomorrow. We co-designed it with Eric Booth, himself the 2015 recipient of the American for the Arts’ Arts Education Leadership Award, and named one of the top 50 most influential arts professionals in the US. EUYO Frontrunners has four broad headlines –Include, Perform, Share and Sustain – and ranges from artistic topics like winning auditions, innovative programming, great chamber music, and exploring period instruments, to musicians’ mental health and wellbeing, and business themes such as creative entrepreneurship and marketing yourself.

Like music, creativity, and leadership, Frontrunners is also constantly evolving and our Autumn 2024 series has a new feature: social media lives! Over the next few weeks, each of our four new episodes takes place in two parts: firstly, a YouTube premiere open to all, followed by a social media live with the artist/presenter a couple of days later. So: if you liked the YouTube broadcast, log on to our socials and take the chance to ask questions and interact directly with our special guest.

To begin Frontrunners 2024, we were delighted to welcome one of our guest artists from the Summer Tour ’24: Isata Kanneh-Mason. Her performances with the EUYO and Iván Fischer of Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Tune were acclaimed by the press as “dazzling”, “stylish”, and with a “sense of genuine invention”; shortly before she appeared with us at Grafenegg Summer Sounds, Carnegie Hall, and Bolzano Festival Bozen, she was the soloist in Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor at the First Night of the Proms.

Indeed, Isata has championed Clara Schumann, with her Decca Classics debut Romance (2019) dedicated to this outstanding but still relatively neglected composer. Her repertoire as a whole brings well-known and more-neglected composers together in intriguing, expressive ways; her latest release on Decca Classics is Mendelssohn – both of them. This lovely recording presents Fanny Mendelssohn’s once-lost Easter Sonata in a new Urtext edition alongside Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto N°.1, transcriptions of other Felix Mendelssohn by Liszt and Rachmaninov, and Fanny Mendelssohn’s own solo Nocturne. If that’s caught your attention, we also recommend The Other Mendelssohn, a Dartmouth Films documentary directed by Sheila Hayman and starring Isata.

On Frontrunners, we talked with Isata about on a key topic for all performances and performers: engaging with audiences. How do you spark a genuine connection with your audience(s), on-stage, online, and in other ways as well? How do you speak with them; how do you programme something fresh that will catch their attention without scaring them away? And, as your career gathers pace, how do you sustain this within an engagement diary that forcibly runs further and further ahead?

Isata began with a YouTube broadcast on Wednesday, 6 November at 7PM CET: a short talk, which you can still watch online. This was followed by a Facebook Live @TheEUYO in conversation with Maria Isabela Nica on Friday, 8 November, also at 7PM CET. Thank you Isata for such imaginative, thoughtful contributions to launch this Frontrunners series.