After more than ten years, the Symphony Orchestra of the Ljubljana Music Academy returns to Berlin and to the festival Young Euro Classic. At its performances in 2004 and 2007 under the conductor George Pehlevanian, the orchestra made an excellent impression, culminating in the European Composers Award for the Slovenian composer Nina Šenk, only 22 years old at the time. The Music Academy’s orchestra celebrates its 60-year anniversary this year; it was founded in 1948 in what was Yugoslavia at the time. Every year, it presents three programmes, with a special focus on older and recent Slovenian composers. Slovenian conductors take turns with their European colleagues. In 2010, the orchestra participated in a project initiated by Riccardo Muti, performing in Trieste and Ravenna together with student ensembles from Croatia and Italy.
Konzerthaus, Berlin
© SenatKultEuropa
Mayor and Senator for Culture and Europe in Berlin
Dr. Klaus Lederer was born in Mecklenburg in 1974 and spent his childhood and early adolescence in Frankfurt an der Oder. After the end of the GDR, he was active in leftist youth organizations and joined the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in 1992. He spent the 1990s studying law at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s law school, where he earned a doctorate, and working for the PDS as a local politician. In December 2005 Klaus Lederer was elected chair of the Berlin Left Party, a position he held until December 2016. From 2003 to January 2017, Dr. Lederer was a member of the Left Party parliamentary group in the House of Representatives, Berlin’s state legislature, and was its spokesperson on legal policy. Dr. Klaus Lederer has been Mayor and Senator for Culture and Europe in Berlin since December 2016.
© David Duchon-Doris
The young French conductor Quentin Hindley began his musical career as a violist at the Paris Opera before switching to the conductor’s podium. He was educated at the National Conservatory, where the Hungarian Zsolt Nagy was his teacher; he also participated in courses with the legendary conducting teacher Jorma Panula, with Neeme and Paavo Järvi, Susanna Mälkki and Michail Jurowski. In 2012 Quentin Hindley became Leonard Slatkin’s assistant at the Orchestre National de Lyon. In the summer of 2015 he worked with Simon Rattle in Aix-en-Provence on the world premiere of the opera The Monster in the Maze by Jonathan Dove. In 2017/18 he conducts this work in Lille, Lisbon and Paris. Apart from many French orchestras, Hindley has also been invited to guest conduct in Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary. In addition to his work with youth orchestras, his is intensely involved in social and intercultural projects, for example a version of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville for children, which was performed in the suburbs of Paris.
The young Slovenian pianist Urban Stanič is currently a student at the Ljubljana Music Academy, where he studies with Dubravka Tomšič Srebotnjak. At the age of three, Urban Stanič received his first piano lessons; he celebrated his first successes at the International Competition for Young Musicians in Povoletto (Udine, Italy), which he won four times in a row. In the meantime, Urban Stanič can look back to a multitude of solo recitals and has performed with various Slovenian orchestras; in June 2017 he played at the opening concert of the festival “Summer in Old Ljubljana”. The pianist also has other outstanding talents: he was national champion in mathematics twice and five times in logics. Furthermore, he has been successful at national chess championships.
“The Symphonic Waltz” (2018, German Premiere)
Piano Concerto in A-Minor Op. 54 (1841)
“Thus Spake Zarathustra” Op. 30 (1896)
7 pm: Pre-Concert Talk with Dieter Rexroth at the Werner-Otto-Saal
Free admission for ticket holders at 6:45 pm
PROGRAMME
It has been several years since the Symphony Orchestra of the Ljubljana Music Academy last performed at Young Euro Classic. However, those performances quickly demonstrated how high the level of musical training is in Slovenia. Thus, this concert is definitely one to look forward to, especially as the young music students from Ljubljana have two hefty “classics” on their music stands: the highly romantic Piano Concerto by Robert Schumann and the mighty tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, in which the masterful orchestrator Richard Strauss was inspired by Nietzsche to pull out all the stops – the result, incidentally, being one of the most famous beginnings in all of music history. The quality of talent at the Slovenian music academy is also illustrated in other ways by this orchestra: in addition to the solo pianist Urban Stanič, the composer of the world premiere, Leon Firšt, is also a student at the Ljubljana Music Academy.
Concert Partner
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