© Bruno Vicente
The Portuguese national youth orchestra Jovem Orquestra Portuguesa – JOP – now returns to Berlin’s Konzerthaus for a fifth time. Founded and financed by the Orquestra de Câmara Portuguesa (OCP), JOP has developed since its founding in 2010 from a chamber orchestra with 20 strings into a full symphony orchestra with over 80 musicians. They are between 14 and 24 years old and come together regularly to work with OCP musicians and international guest artists. The orchestra focuses on contemporary works; it also engages in social projects in many way, for example the integrational work Alcance | Reach by João Godinho, which won the European Composers Award at Young Euro Classic in 2019 (as did the Portuguese work by Mariana Vieira in 2017). In 2023, the JOP first performed together with its “older sister”, the OCP, to perform Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in Lisbon. Last year, the youth orchestra also travelled to the island of São Miguel in the Azores, where it performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Konzerthaus Berlin
© Patrícia Andrade
The Portuguese conductor Pedro Carneiro, born in the capital of Lisbon in 1975, has pursued a double career in music. On the one hand, he is an internationally celebrated percussionist who performs at all the major concert halls between the USA, Japan and Australia. More than 100 world premieres demonstrate his special position as a member of the musical avant-garde, as do his collaborations with the Arditti Quartet, the Tokyo String Quartet and the Chilingirian Quartet. The percussionist has a special love for improvisation, often in combination with live electronics or other innovative technologies. On the other hand, Carneiro has launched a successful career as a conductor. The Portuguese Chamber Orchestra (Orquestra de Câmara Portuguesa) wasfounded at his initiative and has its own concert series at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon. Not least, the Portuguese multi-talent composes orchestral and chamber music, is interested in interactive projects with theatre, film or dance, and develops percussion accessories such as mallets and pedals.
© Anita Tirone
João Caldas (b. 1995) studied with Eurico Carrapatoso at the Escola de Música do Conservatório Nacional and with João Madureira, Luís Tinoco, and Carlos Caires during his Bachelor in Composition at the Escola Superior de Música in Lisbon. In 2019, he began a process of creating solo pieces without written score, in which the musician participates as co-composer. From this approach resulted, among others, the piece murmúrios da terra (2021) for Gamba solo, with musician and artist Carolina Schwäbl-Martins. João Caldas won the 1st prize of the 10th edition of the SPA / Antena 2 Composition Prize in 2021. He was appointed Young Composer-in-residence at the Casa da Música in Porto in the year 2023, resulting in the commissions of Captura de um Gesto for the Remix Ensemble, Âmagos for the Duo Sirius, and Esta Montanha já foi Fogo for the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música. In addition to creating orchestral, chamber and solo works, he has been dedicating himself to music/sound for theatre (Enseada; Stendhal’s Syndrome), sound installations (Réplica), cinema (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari; workshop Trabalho with Pedro Costa), and political/community projects (Kantata do Tecto Incerto). João Caldas currently lives in Cologne.
“Poème Symphonique” (1962)
“Apneia” (2020/2024, German Premiere) 🏆
Symphony No. 9 in E-Minor Op. 95 “From the New World” (1893)
Words of Welcome
Joe Chialo
Senator for Culture and Social Cohesion
Dr. Willi Steul
1st Chairman, Deutscher Freundeskreis europäischer Jugendorchester e.V.
About the concert
The opening night of the 25th edition of Young Euro Classic promises to be fascinating – as the audience has come to expect from the Portuguese National Youth Orchestra! Its founder and director Pedro Carneiro is known for his imaginative programmes, always featuring the premieres of brand-new works as well as german premieres. This year, the orchestra is performing the work “Apneia” by Portuguese composer João Caldas, which was written in 2020 and revised for the Jovem Orquestra Portuguesa in 2024. The work by György Ligeti, which opens the concert, is an avant-garde classic and is known to be special: Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, which produce intriguing sound patterns with their ticking in different rhythms! After the interval, the Portuguese musicians demonstrate that they have also mastered the “great repertoire”: Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony “From the New World” is a timeless masterwork with gorgeous melodies, breath-taking rhythms and Bohemian-inflected sounds.
100 metronomes were kindly provided by the SWR Symphony Orchestra.
