Gianandrea Noseda conducts Tchaikovsky and Berlioz — With the European Union Youth Orchestra

One of the most important events for upcoming orchestral musicians, the Young Euro Classic has taken place every year since 2000 at the Konzerthaus Berlin. In this outstanding concert from the 2018 edition, Maestro Gianandrea Noseda leads the prestigious European Union Youth Orchestra, an ensemble founded in 1976 that has brought rising talents from every E.U. country together to make music with the biggest names in their field.

The prodigiously talented orchestra begins with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, a work that was roundly panned upon its 1892 North American premiere but has since earned a place of honor in the symphonic pantheon. From its well-known, wistful second movement to the furious finale with a notorious ffff dynamic marking, it has become one of the most popular of Tchaikovsky’s works both abroad and at home in Russia, where it was broadcast to boost morale during the Siege of Leningrad in World War II.

The program is rounded out by an ebullient encore, the punchy Hungarian March from Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust—a piece inspired by a Hungarian song that moved Berlioz to shift the setting of his Goethe adaptation from Germany to Austria in order to make it fit the action.