07:00 pm
Kristiina Poska Conductor
Alexandre Tharaud Piano
Yan Maresz Composer
YAN MARESZ · “Recto” (2003, German Premiere)
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART · Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 23 in A-major K. 488 (1786)
CLAUDE DEBUSSY · “La mer” (1903-1905)
The Orchestre Français de Jeunes (OFJ), a popular guest at Young Euro Classic for many years, offers an attractive mix of familiar and unknown music in Berlin this year. Of course, the programme features French orchestral music, represented in exemplary manner by Claude Debussy’s three symphonic sketches La Mer. The contrast is Recto, an orchestral work written by the composer Yan Maresz from Monaco in 2003, focusing on sonic nuance and fragmentation. The centrepiece is Mozart’s famous Piano Concerto in A-major K. 488, in which the sought-after and versatile pianist Alexandre Tharaud will demonstrate that he is as easily at home in the Viennese classical repertoire as with Satie, Poulenc and Ravel. The Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska, familiar to Berlin audiences from her successful tenure at the Komische Oper, took up the position of OFJ’s chief conductor this year.
In 2022, it celebrated its 40-year anniversary: the National French Youth Orchestra, the Orchestre Français des Jeunes (OFJ), was founded in 1982. Ever since, it has made a name for itself as one of the most distinguished youth orchestras in Europe – a fact verified several times already by the Young Euro Classic audience. Its approximately 100 members come together for several working phases a year in the region Hauts-de-France, where they are coached by members of the leading orchestras of France. Since 2019, the OFJ has also offered courses specialized in the interpretation of the classical and early romantic period (1750-1830) with Amandine Beyer. In chamber music formations, the musicians also perform in hospitals, prisons, senior citizen’s residencies and other social institutions, reaching out to people outside the regular concert halls. Since 2025, the Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska has been the Orchestre Français des Jeunes’ chief conductor. The OFJ’s summer tour takes place with the generous support of Aline Foriel-Destezet.
In Berlin, the Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska is a familiar figure: she studied here at the University of the Arts and at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music and conducted the symphony orchestra of the Humboldt University from 2006 to 2011. She was subsequently principal kapellmeister at the Komische Oper Berlin from 2012 to 2016, where she conducted a broad repertoire ranging from Mozart’s Magic Flute to Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. She has long established herself as a sought-after concert and opera conductor and has been invited by the radio symphony orchestras in Cologne, Leipzig and Frankfurt, the Munich Philharmonic, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich and the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. Furthermore, she has conducted opera productions at the Berlin State Opera, the Hamburg State Opera and the opera houses in Helsinki, Stockholm and Zurich. Since 2025, Kristiina Poska has been the chief conductor of the Orchestre Français des Jeunes, with which she undertakes two European concert tours this summer. She has also been the principal guest conductor of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra in Riga since 2021.
The number of 25 solo albums alone which he has recorded over the past decades speaks for the artistic qualities of Alexandre Tharaud, born in Paris in 1968. They cover the full range from baroque masters such as Couperin, Rameau and Scarlatti via Mozart and Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninov to Satie, Poulenc and the recording of the complete solo piano works by Ravel. He dedicated one album to the legendary chanson singer Barbara, another entitled Cinema to film music arranged for piano and orchestra. His artistic curiosity has led him to work intensively with theatre and film-makers, dancers and choreographers. In 2017, Tharaud published the book Montrez-moi vos mains (Show me your hands), a very personal insight into the life of a pianist. In 2012, he also took on a supporting role as a pianist in Michael Haneke’s film Amour (Love). As a soloist, Tharaud has appeared with leading orchestras such as the Orchestre de Paris, the Royal Concertgebouw Orkest, the Cleveland and the Philadelphia Orchestra and the London Philharmonic.
Born in Monaco in 1966, Yan Maresz began his musical studies with piano and percussion, then devoted himself to self-taught jazz guitar, until he met John McLaughlin, whose only student he became, subsequently working for McLaughlin as an arranger and orchestrator. He studied jazz at Boston's Berklee College of Music from 1983 to 1986, and gradually turned to composition. In 1987, he received a scholarship from the Princess Grace Foundation of Monaco and entered the Julliard School in New York, where he studied composition with David Diamond. He collaborates regularly with IRCAM as a composer, researcher and teacher. Since 2007, Yan Maresz has been teaching new technologies and electroacoustic composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris. His broad-ranging repertoire ranges from chamber music for many different combinations of instruments to Recto for orchestra (2003), Répliques for amplified harp and orchestra (2016), Tendances for modern violin and baroque orchestra (2019) to Soli for piano and electronics (2022).