Before Berlin

For the first time in the Lugano region, the AYSO Orchestra brings a major project that for years has united education, experience and international vision. Not simply a youth orchestra, but an artistic journey built around the idea that musical growth is born from the continuous encounter between study, sharing and real orchestral life.

Created within OrchestrAcademy, an institution founded in Bari by Teresa Satalino, the AYSO Orchestra brings together seventy-two young musicians from all over Italy in an intensive experience that combines technical preparation with profound work on collective sound, reciprocal listening and the construction of a true shared artistic identity.

The project also involves teachers and principal players from some of the world’s most important musical institutions, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, the Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala di Milano and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. It is a continuous dialogue between young performers and great professionals that transforms orchestral work into a concrete experience of musical and human transmission, leading the orchestra over the years to distinguish itself in important international contexts, including the Musikverein in Vienna, where it received awards and recognition for artistic quality, interpretative maturity and musical direction.

In 2026 the orchestra is invited to the Young Euro Classic in Berlin, one of the most important international festivals dedicated to youth orchestras. The concert of 14 August therefore represents a particularly significant stage in this journey: not merely a summer event, but a moment leading toward a highly prestigious debut within the European musical landscape.

The programme fully reflects this open and dynamic identity, moving through different sonic worlds without ever losing narrative unity. Tradition and contemporaneity coexist within a journey built upon orchestral colour, rhythmic energy and music’s ability to evoke images, landscapes and visions.

With William Walton, the concert opens in an immediately theatrical and vital dimension. Twentieth-century English writing combines orchestral brilliance, rhythmic tension and a constant internal energy that moves through the sound with elegance and momentum.

A different atmosphere instead emerges in the music of Giuseppe Martucci, a central figure of that Italian symphonic tradition which, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sought new paths far from melodrama. His writing preserves a natural Italian cantabile quality, while expanding it through a broader, more lyrical and profoundly European orchestral sensitivity.

With the Capriccio italiano by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the programme suddenly opens toward light, movement and colour. Born from the composer’s Roman stay, the piece transforms impressions, folk echoes and Italian atmospheres into a great orchestral celebration filled with energy, dance and continuous timbral invention.

The conclusion with Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi leads the concert toward an almost visionary dimension. The Eternal City becomes imaginary landscape, sonic memory and grand orchestral fresco. Respighi transforms the orchestra into a machine of colours, lights and perspectives, capable of evoking the silence of the pine groves, the distance of the ancient Roman roads and the final explosion of imperial Rome.

In the fiftieth anniversary year of Ceresio Estate, this concert therefore represents not only the encounter with a young orchestra of the highest level, but also a concrete look toward the future of music: a place where tradition, research, education and passion return to life as a shared experience, capable of transforming talent into real growth, decisive experiences and international recognition.

BIOGRAPHIES

AYSO ORCHESTRA
The AYSO Orchestra, Accademia Youth Symphony Orchestra, has emerged in recent years as one of the most interesting youth orchestral projects in Italy. It won first prize at the international Summa cum Laude competition in Vienna in 2022 and 2023, as well as the Golden Award at the World Orchestra Festival in Vienna in 2025. In 2026 it will represent Italy at Young Euro Classic in Berlin, one of Europe’s leading festivals devoted to youth orchestras.

TERESA SATALINO
Conductor, composer and teacher Teresa Satalino holds diplomas in piano, composition, conducting, jazz music and music education, combining her musical studies with a degree in literature devoted to Luciano Berio. She has studied with Ennio Morricone, Jorma Panula and Bruno Bartoletti and teaches orchestral conducting at the “Nino Rota” Conservatory in Monopoli. Since 2018 she has been artistic director of the AYSO Orchestra.