At the concert of the Jovem Orquestra Portuguesa at Young Euro Classic on Friday, August 7, I was allowed to attend a rehearsal and speak with horn player João Augusto, violinist Clara Santos, composer César Rafael and mezzo-soprano Cláudia Ribas. It became an afternoon in which words slowly made way for music.
A word that cannot be captured
João Augusto visibly searches for words when I ask him what saudade means to him. It is a feeling that arises when you love something or someone, but cannot be with them – somewhere between nostalgia and longing, he says, without ever being able to fully define it. Clara Santos immediately brings it back to her own situation: she and her fellow musicians are far from home, and it is precisely the intensity of that longing that is difficult to capture in language.
João adds to this and tells me that saudade for him does not only arise from distance from home. It also emerges within the orchestra itself: in the conversations, the glances, the small moments of progress during a rehearsal. When that working period is over, that feeling remains – as a memory of something that no longer exists, even though it just happened. Clara recognizes this immediately: while playing, she thinks back to what happened during the rehearsals, and those memories become part of how they make music together.
Notably, João brings up the second part of the program unprompted. Especially the closing section of Tchaikovsky's Sixth, he says, has a particularly introspective character for him – a moment when the music turns inward and creates space for remembrance and longing. Those words come back to me that evening when the closing section sounds.
A composer between trumpet and Pessoa
César Rafael (°2001) did not start at the piano but with a trumpet, in a brass band in his hometown Vila Real – not unusual in Portugal, where the brass band tradition is strong. Only later did he feel that he wanted not only to play, but to create himself. He studied composition in Évora, completed his master's degree there in 2025, and became composer in residence with the JOP for the 2025/26 season – the commission that resulted in Saudades, só portugueses, his world premiere in Berlin.
Like many young composers, Rafael is still searching for his own musical language, and he is remarkably open about it: in the beginning, he says, you base yourself mainly on your professors, the first examples you have. In his new work, he refers to, among others, Lutosławski's Third Symphony and Mahler – influences that he does not hide, but also does not want to overwhelm. He mainly tries to preserve his own voice among the examples that shaped him.
In the conversation, he tells me that it was almost inevitable to build his piece around saudade, because the festival had given that as a theme. Only later, when I read his notes in the program booklet, do I discover how directly Rafael builds on Fernando Pessoa's Mensagem – the collection in which Pessoa evokes the Portuguese age of discovery. Rafael does not translate his own experience of that era into it, which he has no more than Pessoa did, but instead focuses on those who were left behind: those who watched their loved ones depart to seas that no sailor had ever seen. It is, in other words, not a musical illustration of a word, but an investigation into the boundary between saudade and nostalgia.
That he wants to make the audience consciously search for it also has to do with the audience itself. Most listeners in Berlin are not Portuguese, he explains: they may know saudade as a word, but not as something rooted in their language and culture. That is precisely why he wants them to ask themselves while listening where that saudade actually sits in his music – a question that would be answered more quickly for a Portuguese listener than for the rest of the audience.
For a young Portuguese composer, this is a unique opportunity: commissions for large orchestra are rare in Portugal. That a youth orchestra offers him that chance – with musicians from his own generation – makes the world premiere more than a practical commission.
A rehearsal that listens to the hall
Between conversations, I attend the rehearsal itself and see a concentrated but remarkably open way of working. Pedro Carneiro is charming and accessible, works concentratedly but without distance, and kindly responds to questions from his musicians. Together with his assistant conductors, he continuously listens to the balance between the orchestral groups and to how the sound spreads through the hall of the Konzerthaus: small adjustments, relistened, adjusted. A rehearsal turns out to be not only about learning notes, but equally about finding the right sound for this space.
I also hear Rafael's new work for the first time, and it does not let me go for the rest of the afternoon. It is dark, almost hermetic, a story that does not immediately make itself understood. Where exactly is the saudade – with those who depart, with those who remain, or in the longing itself? I have no answer, but I know I want to hear it again that evening.
When the music takes over
The concert opens with the festival hymn that Iván Fischer (°1951) wrote for Young Euro Classic in 2011. Because I had only heard the work in brass arrangement during the previous evenings, this performance is a surprise. Now it sounds through the full orchestra, and especially the strings add a richness, warmth and breadth that give the work a completely different flair.
The overture Le Corsaire by Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) is performed with great playing pleasure. What is particularly striking is the balance between the orchestra sections – nothing seems to be placed by chance, and after what I had seen that afternoon about rehearsing in function of the hall, I now hear the result.
Then, without interruption, the two Berlioz songs. Cláudia Ribas brings them intimately and with feeling, but at the same time with dramatic effect: as Dido in the aria from Les Troyens she sings not only about farewell, she seems to undergo it, until she sinks begging to her knees. At the great brass eruptions her voice is occasionally drowned out, but the depth of feeling remains intact – what a voice and what presence this mezzo has. In Sur les lagunes her voice takes on a more intimate, inward-looking colour: the man who misses his deceased beloved and must set out to sea without love stands alone again facing the water. And then I suddenly understand something of saudade that nobody could have explained to me that afternoon – the music does it itself.
Then sounds the world premiere of Rafael's Saudades, só portugueses. Demanding for musicians and listeners alike, but intriguing from the dark opening in the deep strings. Violent brass eruptions, a melancholic clarinet, music of searching and not-finding. Knowing what I now know about Pessoa, those left behind and the Lutosławski and Mahler traces that Rafael himself mentioned, I hear the piece differently than during the rehearsal: less as a riddle, more as the gaze from the shore that I already sensed that afternoon. Almost like the lonely figure from Caspar David Friedrich's Mönch am Meer, who looks out over a sea that cannot be fathomed. That the new work stirs something in the Berlin audience is evident from the applause that follows. What exactly everyone heard or recognized, of course I don't know – and perhaps that's precisely what Rafael wanted to achieve.
After the intermission sounds Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). This Pathétique cuts to the bone. Pedro Carneiro takes his musicians on a journey and manages to extract an improbably intense reading from their energy. The first movement is enormously dynamic and, despite complex rhythms, surprisingly clear – you can hear that hard work has been done here – all the way to the climax at the end of the movement that takes your breath away. The second movement is noticeably fast, perhaps somewhat less dance-like than usual, but with an impressive role for the timpani: their rhythm, worked out unusually emphatically, makes your heart beat faster and faster. An iron-strong invention that leaves you gasping for breath. In the third part, the atmosphere gradually shifts from familiar rhythm to something uncomfortable: no cymbal crashes of pure joy, rather a forced gaiety. Kurt Sanderling once called this movement a vision of decline, and this performance has something of that about it. The obligatory applause after the third part breaks a tension arc that didn't want to end yet – but perhaps it was also just necessary, after three parts without interruption.
The fourth part builds up slowly toward its climax. Toward the end the heartbeat remains violent, as if life is resisting with its last strength. Different from how I'm used to hearing this music, but perhaps fitting for an orchestra of young people who are only at the beginning of life and who give their vision of this ending from that position. This is precisely where I hear back what João said that afternoon: this final movement is inward-looking, a moment of remembrance rather than of climax for the sake of climax.
At times in this performance there were moments where an instrument could have been heard more clearly, where something didn't quite line up – but with such an intense performance, that's allowed, perhaps it even has to be. Life itself is not perfect either. After the final note comes a long silence. No one seems in a hurry to break it. After such an intense experience, I would have preferred not to hear an encore at all. But Pedro Carneiro chooses a different path. He lets his two assistant conductors take the honors and gives the evening an unexpected new twist.
With Vasco Ferrão at the helm, the JOP brings Movimento Perpétuo by Carlos Paredes (1925-2004), a virtuosic and rhythmic work in which the orchestra shows its prowess one more time. The atmosphere changes, the tension takes on a different form and the young musicians seem to surrender themselves completely to the joy of playing once more.
Then it becomes more intimate and perhaps the most special moment of the entire evening. Under the direction of Jorge Leiria, the full orchestra sings two politically charged protest songs by Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906-1994) that move me deeply. Suddenly the instruments are no longer the bearers of the music: the voices of the young musicians themselves fill the hall. It is a surprising, moving finale – and again a striking form of saudade: music that not only looks back, but also remembers, testifies and preserves something that must not be lost.
After the silence
I think back to Clara, who hoped for goosebumps. To João, who called the energy of the JOP unique. To César, who wanted especially the foreign audience to wonder exactly where the saudade in his music lies.
And perhaps the answer is this: saudade does not only lie in missing home, or in the memory of those who are no longer here. It also lies in the smile during a rehearsal, in a composition that from the moment of its first note becomes part of the past, in the knowledge that these young musicians will soon go their separate ways – each towards their own future, while what they built here together now exists only in their memory, in the music they made together and in the memory of those who were allowed to witness it.
In the afternoon, João, Clara and César had tried to put words to a feeling that can barely be explained. In the evening, those words were no longer needed.