Foreign Minister Steinmeier now Orchestra Campus patron
July 3, 2014
From September 18 to 24, 2014, the 85 musicians of the Bilkent Youth Symphony Orchestra will take part in the Orchestra Campus project organized by Deutsche Welle and the Beethovenfest Bonn. Along with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, a world premiere will also be on the program. Each year, Deutsche Welle commissions a fresh work from a composer hailing from the guest orchestra's home country. This year, DW requested the piece from Tolga Yayalar, a music professor born in 1973 in Istanbul who teaches at Bilkent University in Ankara.
The Bilkent Symphony Orchestra was founded by a university faculty in 1993. Ten years later, Isin Metin became its artistic director, taking over its youth orchestra two years later. The Bilkent Youth Symphony Orchestra (BGSO) consists of 110 young musicians aged 15 to 27. It's among Turkey's leading young ensembles.
Talent and motivation
Each year, a youth or university orchestra from outside Germany's borders has been invited to Beethoven's city of birth, Bonn, for at least one week. Thanks to the Orchestra Campus initiative, motivated young performers from Kyiv, Istanbul, Tbilisi, Beijing, Krakow, Johannesburg, Cairo, St. Petersburg, Hanoi, Sao Paulo and various cities in Iraq have put in a stop in the former German capital.
The high point of each young orchestra's stay is a campus concert, which culminates the project in Bonn's Beethoven Hall. The program always combines a piece by Beethoven with the work commissioned by DW from the orchestra's home country.
Cultural exchange
For the third consecutive year, Turkey is the partner for the Orchestra Campus initiative. In 2012, "Beethoven ile bulusma - Encounters with Beethoven" got underway with a visit from the Turkish National Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, and last year, the Istanbul University State Conservatory Symphony Orchestra came to Bonn. On September 23, 2014, young Turkish talents will once again perform in the city's Beethoven Hall. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who has taken over as patron of the Orchestra Campus, said, "I'm pleased that the Bilkent Youth Symphony Orchestra from Ankara will perform this year to round out the 'Beethoven ile bulusma - Encounters with Beethoven' project. This is an important contribution to the expansion of cultural relations with Turkey."
Earlier in June, Steinmeier of the Social Democrats (SPD) kicked off the German-Turkish exchange in Istanbul - an initiative with which the two countries hope to promote exchanges among young people.
suc/gsw (Beethovenfest)