Founded in 2013, the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, or NYO-USA, has made an outstanding name for itself around the world within a very short period; the New York Times celebrated it for “exuding vitality and confidence”. The orchestra, which unites the best young talents of the USA aged 16 to 19, has undertaken tours not only to Europe, but also to Asia and South American in recent years, appearing at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, the National Centre of the Performing Arts in Beijing and Suntory Hall in Tokyo, to name just a few. Renowned conductors such as Michael Tilson Thomas, Antonio Pappano and Daniel Harding led these tours, and soloists ranging from mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato to cellist Alisa Weilerstein and violinists Joshua Bell and Gil Shaham and pianist Emanuel Ax, have worked with NYO-USA.
The orchestra meets for three-week rehearsal phases at Purchase College of the State University of New York, north of New York City, which culminates with a concert at Carnegie Hall itself.  

Berlin concertgoers will have vivid memories of the American conductor Karina Canellakis, who was principal guest conductor at the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin from 2019 to 2023. Today, she holds the same position at the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and since 2019 she has been chief conductor of the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest in Hilversum in the Netherlands. As part of the Concertgebouw Amsterdam’s annual opera series, Canellakis most recently conducted Britten’s Peter Grimes in March of this year, following a multi-part Janáček cycle. At this year’s Mozart Week in Salzburg, the conductor made her debut with the Vienna Philharmonic. Regular invitations have taken the 44-year-old, who grew up within a family of musicians with Russian and Greek roots in New York, to the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris and to major American orchestras in San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago..

The Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein is hardly an unknown entity in Berlin. From the German capital, where he was appointed professor at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in 2018, he travels to concerts all over the world, performing a repertoire that seems boundless, ranging from baroque suites to classical piano concertos to contemporary music, cabaret and jazz. Alban Berg and Olivier Messiaen are equally present as the works of Rachmaninov, which he recorded for CD with the Berlin Philharmonic under Kirill Petrenko. He frequently performs world premieres; in addition to works by Chick Corea, Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knusssen and Brad Mehldau, the Piano Concerto by Thomas Adès stands out – since 2019, Gerstein has performed it more than sixty times with twenty different orchestras. Born in Voronezh, Russia, in 1979 and educated in St. Petersburg, Kirill Gerstein was invited to study at the Berklee College of Music at the age of 14, following this with a degree from the Manhattan School of Music. Winning the gold medal of the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv in 2001 opened the doors for Kirill Gertein’s meteoric career.

Frederik Hanssen, born in 1969 in Berlin, studied musicology and French philology in his hometown as well as in Clermont-Ferrand and Milan. From 1998 until the end of 2025, he worked as an editor for classical music at the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel. In addition to his journalistic work, he is active in music education serving as the author of programme booklets, concert moderations, and speaker for introductory lectures. Frederik Hanssen lives with his family in Berlin and Rome.