In Bologna, a youth orchestra plays for world peace

BOLOGNA, 09 JUN – A truly titanic undertaking carried out yesterday afternoon in Bologna, among the Gothic columns of the Basilica of San Petronio which was brought to port happily and with great public participation: it is the “Youth in Concert: Together for Peace” organized by the Ode to Joy Music School of Bologna of which Natalia Bracci and Annamaria Di Lauro were “courageous captains”. A concert, included in the program of the Bologna Portici Festival, which involved around 350 young instrumentalists and choristers aged 6 to 25 from the music schools of Bologna, Milan, Fiesole and Macerata with guests the musicians of the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, the symphonic team founded by the musical director of the Teatro Comunale of Bologna, Oksana Lyniv. Seeing and listening to violins, violas and cellos of all sizes held by young passionate instrumentalists, as well as the large section of wind instruments and percussion instruments, was a priceless emotion in the succession of pieces performed gradually by the various schools; then the superb performance of the young Ukrainians (basically an orchestra of professionals) and the immense emotion aroused by the song Melody by the composer Myroslav Skoryk sung by the soprano Yulia Tkachenko, complete with the flag of her tormented country; until the final apotheosis, when everyone together performed the famous opening from Orff’s Carmina Burana and then Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the piece that perhaps more than any other calls for peace, “that peace which the Ukrainians call myr, the Israelis shalom, the Palestinians salam”, he was remembered. On the podium, in a Basilica with over 1200 cheering spectators, Luciano Acocella’s expert baton created the incredible amalgam between the many members of the various orchestras. In short, an exciting, incredible and contagious lesson of peace invoked and addressed by children and young people to adults all over the world. The donations collected were donated to the Soleterre Foundation of Milan which has been active for years in Ukraine with humanitarian projects. (HANDLE).