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THE PROJECT OF SESSION 2017
World Youth Choir is a unique international music educational, social project of high artistic quality that collects talented young singers from 17 to 26 years of age each year in an international audition and selection system and organizes them into a choir from all over the world, under the leadership of renown choir conductors. For the young singers with entirely different cultural background, the common rehearsals, the concerts and tours offer a unique opportunity to get to know different cultures, people, music and traditions. Since its establishment in 1989, more than 1,000 singers from 65 countries have been given the opportunity to work with over 46 worldrenowned conductors and over 20 CD and DVD recordings have been published. World Youth Choir is run by an foundation established by the European Chorus Association - Europa Cantat, IFCM (International Federation for Choral Music) and the Jeunesses Musicales International (International Youth Music Association), and UNESCO also recognizes it as a major project (in 1996, Artist for Peace, WYC title was awarded to this musical platform effectively supporting intercultural dialogue).
6 — World Youth Choir 2017 Concert Tour
During this year’s project, held from 4 to 24 July 2017, following a 9-day intensive rehearsal period in Pécs, the World Youth Choir (58 singers from 33 countries in 5 continents) lead by Zoltán Pad, conductor of the Choir the Hungarian Radio and Ken Wakia, founding conductor of the Nairobi Chamber Choir in Kenya and Safaricom Choir, will have 12 concerts in Hungary (Pécs, Budapest), Serbia (Sombor, Novi Sad, Belgrade), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo, Prijedor), Croatia (Osijek, Zagreb, Opatija) and Slovenia (Koper, Ljubljana). The concert acts conducted by the two conductors will feature fundamentally different, colourful repertoires, which are exceptional Chorus-music ventures in the music of Europe and, in particular, Central and South-Eastern Europe, Africa and the gems of world music, from Romanticism to the present day. Based on the successful regional cooperation system of Pécs EUROPA CANTAT XIX International Choir Festival in Pécs in 2015 as well as on Pécs’s strategic geopolitical and cultural bridgebuilding efforts, the more than one-year-long preparation of the 2017 summer tour, the logistics and art organization will be supervised by Zsolnay Heritage Management non-profit Ltd. and the
Central-East European Choral Center in co-operation with the hosts of each concert. The cultural flagship of Pécs, Zsolnay Heritage Management non-profit Ltd, was established under the European Capital of Culture project to operate the city’s Cultural Infrastructure. Central-East European Choral Center is the regional office of European Choral Association - EUROPA Cantat. During the World Youth Choir concert tour, special emphasis will be put on the cooperation between the cities of Pécs and the southern partner countries, paying particular attention to the future European capitals of culture (Novi Sad, Fiume). Besides, a special role will be given to choir music as a universal language with peace-building power as well as a means to create dialogues between different nationalities and religions in this region of Europe seriously burdened by historical conflicts. The main sponsors of the project are the Hungarian Ministry of Human Capacities and the City Council of Pécs.