Twenty-seven years ago, a festival was born in Berlin that distinguished itself from the many international music festivals Europe has to offer. Young Euro Classic wanted not only to provide a platform for the best youth orchestras on the continent, but above all to create a place where music brings people, cultures and generations into contact with one another. This premise has hardly lost its significance over the past decades. On the contrary: at a time when, as Gabriele Minz puts it herself, many people view the world with uncertainty and feel that everything is threatening to drift apart, the festival's original mission may sound more timely than ever. This edition confirms once again that classical music can be much more than an artistic experience alone. It creates a space in which young people from different parts of the world truly meet each other, learn to understand one another and, without grand words, experience that a shared musical tradition remains one of the most direct answers to division.
This is also the undercurrent that continuously surfaces in the conversation that Werner De Smet conducted for Klassiek Centraal with Director General Dr. Gabriele Minz and project manager Carolin Trispel. Young Euro Classic was never conceived as a succession of summer concerts, but always as a meeting place where artistic excellence, cultural curiosity and international dialogue reinforce each other. Behind the impressive list of participating orchestras lies a vision that has scarcely changed since its founding: young musicians need not only an international platform, but equally a context in which they can meet each other without competition as a driving force, but with exchange as a starting point. In that sense, the festival has grown over twenty-seven years into an established fixture on the international festival calendar, without ever letting go of the original ideal that underpinned it.
A European dream in Berlin
This idea emerged in post-reunification Berlin, a city still very much searching for its new identity and at the same time growing into the symbol of a Europe in which old borders were slowly beginning to disappear. Against that backdrop, Gabriele Minz and Willi Steul – then chair of the Deutscher Freundeskreis europäischer Jugendorchester e. V., the association that founded Young Euro Classic – developed the idea for a festival that would let the European idea speak not through political language, but through music. "When we established Young Euro Classic as a private initiative, we primarily wanted to keep the idea of a democratic and open Europe alive," says Minz. "We were convinced that music connects people with each other, regardless of national borders, generations or language." This conviction still forms the foundation of the festival today. Precisely for this reason, Young Euro Classic, twenty-seven years later, still carries the same core message, even though the festival has meanwhile grown into an event of much larger scale.
From the beginning, then, it was more than a festival in the classical sense of the word. It had to become a place where exceptionally gifted young musicians from diverse countries and cultural backgrounds could meet at the highest artistic level, without competition setting the tone. The exchange of ideas, traditions and interpretations became the real objective, and Berlin proved to be no accident the ideal location for this. No other city visibly carries the history of division and reunification in the same way, and precisely that tension makes it a logical backdrop for a festival that wants not to affirm borders but to transcend them. From this same idea also emerged the Diplomatic Board, in which embassies of the participating countries continue to this day to play not just a supporting but also a symbolic role in the festival's international anchoring.
What seems almost self-evident today was anything but at the start. The festival began, after all, as a one-time project around the millennium, without guarantee of continuation. That it still exists twenty-seven years later and enjoys international standing was never foreseen. It was above all the reactions of public, press and musicians that convinced the initiators to keep building. In the process, there also grew an awareness that the original European focus was too limited to bear the project's momentum. Although the first editions brought together exclusively European youth orchestras, it quickly became clear that musical tradition cannot be confined within geographical boundaries. "The European orchestral tradition has left deep marks worldwide," says Minz. "Precisely for this reason, it is so interesting to see how different countries have taken up that tradition and given it their own voice." This insight, incidentally, did not grow without resistance. The concept of a festival exclusively for youth orchestras was initially met with considerable skepticism and sometimes even pitied. Few believed that young ensembles could captivate a broad audience over several weeks. The artistic quality of the participating orchestras has since thoroughly confuted those doubts.
Thus Young Euro Classic grew into an international meeting point where orchestras from Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America and Oceania meet each other in one shared context. The European classical tradition remains the starting point, not as a norm or boundary, but as a common language in which differences are permitted to be heard. What once began as a European initiative thus developed into a laboratory where diverse performance practices, musical backgrounds and cultural sensitivities continuously influence and enrich each other. This international expansion has not distanced the festival from its original mission, but rather strengthened it. Young Euro Classic proves today that artistic quality cannot be determined by age or origin, but by talent, conviction and the willingness to listen to each other across borders.
For this edition, Minz sums up the thread running through the program in three words: Confidence as Sound – hope and confidence as sound. At a time when many people view the world with uncertainty, the festival wants to show that music can give hope, can connect people and can help shape the future. Not naive waiting, she emphasizes, but an engine to remain capable of action.
A festival that creates itself
That artistic quality remains the foundation of programming today, although it is not imposed in a rigid format. After consultation with the artistic directors – cellist Alban Gerhardt and Mathias Hinke – the orchestras largely determine their own programs, soloists and conductors. Only a number of broad guidelines ensure balance: a large symphonic work, a solo concerto, contemporary music and ideally a work from their own cultural context. "The orchestras are not only our guests, they help determine the character of the festival," says Carolin Trispel, and therein lies the uniqueness of the whole: the festival is not assembled as a program, but emerges as a sum of artistic voices.
This philosophy is also consistently followed through in the selection of orchestras. Artistic excellence remains the first criterion, but attention is also paid to international distribution and variety. Usually the national youth orchestras submit their own candidacy, but sometimes the organization also takes the initiative to invite a particularly remarkable ensemble. Some ensembles return regularly, such as the European Union Youth Orchestra and the Bundesjugendorchester, which are invited almost every year because of their special significance for the festival, while others are given the chance via a rotation system to present themselves in Berlin.
For many young musicians, such an invitation means more than a performance: it is a form of recognition, a confirmation that their trajectory is being seen, and often also a first step in an international network that will help determine their further development. Some orchestras have even been founded partly with this ambition in mind: the Portuguese Jovem Orquestra Portuguesa established itself with a view to an invitation to Young Euro Classic, by its own account. For musicians who ultimately do get to play in the Konzerthaus Berlin, that remains a moment they will remember for the rest of their lives – not only because of the hall itself, but because it makes their years of work visible and acknowledges it.
The audience is also an integral part of this dynamic. Over the years, the festival has built a loyal audience, some of whom even plan their stay in Berlin during festival weeks in order to attend multiple concerts. For many, Young Euro Classic has become a set appointment in the summer. At the same time, the organization continues to seek new generations through music schools, collaborations with Berlin neighborhoods and digital channels. Noteworthy is the openness with which this audience approaches the program: not only the great classics, but also contemporary music and lesser-known works are received with the same curiosity. This attitude makes it possible to give new music a full place, which is further reinforced by the European Composition Prize – awarded by the Mayor of Berlin – in which a lay jury crowns the best world or German premiere of the festival and thus underscores that new music does not belong exclusively in the hands of specialists.
Although Young Euro Classic has meanwhile become a global festival, the European idea has essentially remained the same as at its founding, according to Minz – though it may be more important today than ever. At a time when international tensions are increasing again, she sees culture as one of the few domains where genuine encounter still remains possible. "At Young Euro Classic, everyone meets each other on an equal footing," she says. This principle is visible in the Diplomatic Board and in the equal treatment of all participating orchestras. Thus a festival emerges in which musicians not only represent their own tradition, but also, without forcing it, embody a form of cultural diplomacy. Minz also points out that Young Euro Classic takes place at a time when Berlin's major concert halls traditionally take their summer break. Precisely because of this, the festival has grown into a unique meeting place in the city's cultural life, where for seventeen consecutive days young musicians from around the world can meet each other and the public.
The 2026 edition makes this vision tangible in an exceptionally rich and international program, with debuting orchestras from Luxembourg, China, Turkmenistan, Slovenia and Italy, among others, alongside the fiftieth anniversary of the European Union Youth Orchestra. For the first time in the festival's history, moreover, a choir alone fills an entire concert evening: the Estonian National Opera Boys' Choir. On top of that come cross-border projects in which genres and traditions intersect, such as the encounter between the South Indian Konnakol Trio around Karthik Mani and jazz musicians around saxophonist Jakob Manz, or the collaboration between the Polish Penderecki Youth Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Americas, who together rehearse a new program for a shared debut concert.
In the series Future Now – Musical Diaries this openness is taken further: ensembles from Argentina, Morocco, Vietnam and Tajikistan, together with an international ensemble of four nations, present their contemporary perspective on their own musical tradition. And with YEC in the Hood the festival enters Berlin's urban space itself – on August 3, for example, musicians from the Bundesjugendorchester and the National Youth Orchestra of the USA come together for two pop-up concerts in neighborhoods of the city, away from the Konzerthaus.
Marco Mertens
Minz and Trispel look with realism at what lies ahead of them, but without doubt about the core. The symphonic youth orchestra remains the heart of the festival, while the context around it continues to grow through new collaborations and urban initiatives. Thus Trispel wants the format Festival within a Festival – with which the festival opened its gaze toward musical traditions beyond the classical orchestral world – to further develop in the coming years, together with a continued expansion of YEC in the Hood. The greatest challenge here lies not in the artistic content, but in the financial reality facing cultural organizations today. Digital media will play an increasingly important role, but exclusively as a gateway, never as a replacement for the live experience.
Because ultimately, that remains the very essence of Young Euro Classic: the conviction that music only truly gains its meaning when performed live, in the same space, between people who meet not through screens but through sound. There, in that shared presence, hope remains audible as music.
