A world premiere of 4 Climate Change concertos as part of 6 community performances puts Sustainability and Democracy at the heart of the EUYO’s Spring 2023 Tour.
Demonstrating classical music’s continuing relevance to our lives, the EUYO Spring 2023 ‘Earth4All’ tour tackles two of the most pressing themes of current times in a tour that also places partnership working at its core.
The tour is a result of a collaboration between the EUYO and the Earth4All Platform, an organisation aiming to secure a safe and prosperous future for the world through new behaviours, for the first time using cultural events to spread the Platform’s message.
The Spring tour also sees the EUYO continuing its role as a cultural ambassador of the EU, making visits outside of the EU to Serbia, North Macedonia and Kosovo, in addition to performances in Poland, Romania and Greece. The concerts include the Orchestra’s debut performances in Timişoara and Pristina, as well as our first performance in Belgrade since 1980.
Programme
The first half of the tour programme highlights aspects of Democracy, with music by J S Bach, Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Terry Riley each underlining issues ranging from equality and equal voices through to shared leadership.
In C by Terry Riley sees different local performing groups join the EUYO in each location, underlining not just the democratic message of the tour but the EUYO’s collaborative, open, spirit. The commitment to each locality is further reinforced by a range of additional works unique to each venue of the tour, starting with Penderecki’s Ciaccona in the tour’s opening concert in Lusławice, Poland.
The second half of the concert programme, The [Uncertain] Four Seasons*, highlights another pressing issue of our time – that of climate change – with a world premiere of four new concertos. Carmen Fizzarotti’s reworking of Vivaldi’s masterpiece uses climate change data as a basis for its transformation, using models of what the climate will be like in four of our tour cities in the year 2050, if action is not taken to reverse biodiversity loss. Audiences will experience a depiction in sound of what climate change means to humanity in these world premiere performances.
Partnership
A third pillar of the tour is partnership. In each city we work with local musicians to realise the concert, with those groups joining us on stage or performing in their own right. These groups include the recently formed West Balkans Youth Orchestra, the Penderecki Youth Orchestra, FAME’s European Orchestral Performing Institute, the Megaro Youth Symphony Orchestra, musicians from Music University of Timişoara, and a grouping of young Serb musicians especially created for the Belgrade performance.
Our concert in Lusławice celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Krzysztof Penderecki European Centre for Music, whilst in Timişoara we take part in that city’s European Capital of Culture programme. In Belgrade we partner with the EU Delegation to Serbia’s EU Opportunity Week as well as celebrating the 60th Birthday of Europa Nostra, whilst in Skopje we welcome young players from our Creative Europe colleagues, the FAME’s European Orchestral Performing Institute. Following a debut in Pristina at the ReMusica Festival, we finish the tour with the Megaro Youth Symphony Orchestra in Thessaloniki, a group that we helped in the creation of in 2015.
Marshall Marcus, Secretary General of the European Union Youth Orchestra commented:
“At the EUYO we feel it is vital to highlight new kinds of work in a concert: underscoring the ability of culture to highlight major societal issues through the undeniable power and shared language of music. We hope that the audiences that join us throughout our tour come away from the concert not just with the memory of a superb musical experience, but also with these issues at the forefront of their minds, with debate, discussion and even action provoked through the experience. The work that Earth4All and projects such as The [Uncertain] Four Seasons do has proved to be a huge source of inspiration for all of us at EUYO. Considering that Music Moves Europe is the major framework for the European Commission’s actions in support of the European music sector, we hope to make our Spring 2023 Earth4All tour a real contribution to such a framework, and indeed, to moving audiences throughout Europe with our music.”
