07:00 pm
Katharina Wincor Conductor
Ioana Cristina Goicea Violin
Adrian Pop Composer
ADRIAN POP · “Hore” (2018, German Premiere)
JEAN SIBELIUS · Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D-minor Op. 47 (1903-1904, rev. 1905)
SERGEI RACHMANINOV · Symphonic Dances Op. 45 (1940)
DOS PARES DE LA OEIN / NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA OF ROMANIA · A dialogue without words
The National Youth Orchestra of Romania, acclaimed for its impressive achievements several times over the past years, opens the Festival with Sergei Rachmaninov’s crowning mature work, the Symphonic Dances. It is a large-scale work from his American exile, in which the composer took musical stock of his life and his Russian homeland. The Violin Concerto by the Finn Jean Sibelius, on the other hand, was the work of a mature 40-year-old, which began its triumph in Berlin in 1905 and has remained highly popular to this day, due to its deep roots in the soundscape of Scandinavia. The solo part is entrusted to the young Romanian violinist Ioana Cristina Goicea, who studied in Germany and was appointed professor of violin in Vienna at the young age of 27. The Austrian conductor Katharina Wincor leads the orchestra: when she lifts her baton on August 1 for Young Euro Classic’s opening night, she will have a season full of impressive conducting debuts behind her.
A dialogue without words: for a fleeting moment, the musicians of the National Youth Orchestra of Romania meet the ensemble Dos Pares de la OEIN from Bolivia on the opening night of the Festival. Without a score. Without a fixed repertoire. The result is a musical dialogue, a creative adventure, a unique listening experience. A five-minute composition, only for the here and now.
The ensemble Dos Pares de la OEIN will perform at the Werner-Otto-Saal the next day, August 2, at 5 pm.
Dr Torsten Kühne, State Secretary of the Berlin Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family Affairs
Dr. Willi Steul, 1st Chairman Deutscher Freundeskreis europäischer Jugendorchester e.V.
Founded in 2008, the National Youth Orchestra of Romania has won the hearts of the Young Euro Classic audience several times already. This summer, it opens the Festival for the first time and has invited Katharina Wincor as a guest conductor for this special occasion. Cristian Mandeal is the orchestra’s chief conductor, conveying not only technical knowhow to the musicians aged 18 to 28, but also a palpable enthusiasm for music-making. In the meantime, the youth orchestra has also worked with other renowned conductors, such as Cristian Măcelaru, Michael Sanderling, Lawrence Foster and Kristjan Järvi. The fact that the orchestra is invited regularly to play at the renowned George Enescu Festival in Bucharest is another testament to its high level. It has also performed in Rome, Paris, Brussels, Vienna and Istanbul, as well as the festivals in Ravello and Aix-en-Provence. While the first CD production of the National Youth Orchestra was dedicated to Romanian composers, the second, entitled Trans-Europa-Express, featured works by Grieg, Fauré, Tchaikovsky and Khachaturian.
Raised in Upper Austria, Katharina Wincor began studying conducting at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts, continuing from 2018 onwards in Zurich. In 2020, she was among the winners of the Mahler Competition in Bamberg, subsequently being invited to a master class with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam and Iván Fischer, who then hired her as his assistant for several productions with the Budapest Festival Orchestra. In March 2022, Wincor stepped in at short notice for a concert of the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra, leading Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. During the 2024/25 season, the conductor not only returned to the Bruckner Orchestra Linz and Klangforum Wien, but also made her debut with the SWR Symphony Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra as well as orchestras in Madrid, São Paulo, Phoenix/Arizona, Tokyo and in Queensland/Australia. Katharina Wincor is closely associated with the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, where she implemented a chamber orchestra project celebrating the composer’s 150th birthday in 2024.
Born in the Romanian capital of Bucharest in 1992 into a family of musicians, Ioana Cristina Goicea studied in Germany, attending the universities in Leipzig, Rostock and Hanover. In 2017, she won the first prize in the Michael Hill Violin Competition in New Zealand; in 2018, she became the first prize winner of the German Music Competition in Bonn, and in 2019, she was among the winners of the Concours Reine Elisabeth in Brussels. The violinist has appeared as a soloist at renowned concert halls such as the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, St. Martin in the Fields in London, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, the Bozar in Brussels, the Meistersingerhalle in Nürnberg and at the Atheneum in Bucharest. In 2019, her CD Romantic Exuberance featuring violin sonatas by Strauss, Korngold and Stan Golestan was published, followed in 2021 by the album Aachener Walzer with orchestral works by Tchaikovsky and Parfenov. In October 2020, Ioana Cristina Goicea was appointed professor of violin at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna at the age of only 27.
“My encounter with Adrian Pop’s music was a true discovery: I found it fresh and virtuosic, extremely idiomatic, simple yet sophisticated.” Thus the great Hungarian composer György Kurtág in 2007 about the Romanian composer. Born in 1951 in Cluj, Adrian Pop has long been among the most prominent musical personalities of his country; in his homeland, he won the Prize of the Romanian Composer’s Union no less than five times. In his hometown of Cluj, Pop began studying composition; he then had the opportunity to leave Romania, then under Communist rule, for courses and studies in Western Europe, e.g. in Bayreuth, Rome, London and Amsterdam. He is a long-term collaborator of the Transylvanian State Philharmonic in Cluj, where he has served as artistic advisor and artistic director. Between 2008 and 2012, Pop was also the rector of the Music Academy Gheorge Dima, where he still teaches composition today.